Manor house and property facing each other across bridleway – Defendant buying manor house – Plaintiff inheriting property – Preliminary issue of whether plaintiff or defendant owned bridleway – Whether presumption of grant ad medium filum had been rebutted – High Court holding bridleway owned by defendant – Court of Appeal dismissing appeal
S was the owner of a large holding. He died intestate. His children entered into a family agreement which provided for the bulk of the land to be divided in specie and devised to them in agreed plots. Under the agreement F became the owner of a manor house and surrounding land which included a bridleway. There was no reference in the family agreement to the bridleway. F then sold the manor house by a conveyance which purported to include the bridleway. It was then sold and resold, each conveyance purporting to include the bridleway. The final purchaser was the plaintiff. F retained some of the inherited land on which he built a property. The property faced the manor house across the bridleway. On F’s death the property was inherited by the second defendant.
The plaintiff built a cesspit beneath the bridleway. The defendants asserted the second defendant’s title to the bridleway. The plaintiff then obtained an express conveyance of the bridleway from her vendor. The second defendant obtained a conveyance of the bridleway from S’s estate and a preliminary issue was ordered as to its ownership. The judge found it was owned by the second defendant. The plaintiff appealed. It was common ground that when S’s land had been divided between his children the presumption of grant ad medium filum applied to the assent of S’s administrator and therefore because F had been conveyed land which had adjoined the bridleway, the bridleway passed with the conveyance, with the result that unless the presumption could be rebutted F had owned the bridleway and had conveyed it with the manor house. The defendants contended that the presumption had been rebutted by a contrary intention of S’s administrator to be inferred from her participation in the family arrangement to which it gave effect.
Held The plaintiff’s appeal was dismissed.
It was clear that it had not been intended that the bridleway was to pass to F under the family agreement. The family agreement had not purported to dispose of all S’s land and the non-inclusion of the bridleway appeared to have been deliberate rather than as a result of an oversight, since it was sensible that it remained with the estate as a whole. Accordingly, the presumption had been rebutted and the ownership of the bridleway remained with S’s estate. Therefore it was owned by the second defendant: see Pryor v Petre [1894] 2 Ch 11.
Grant Crawford (instructed by Chisholms, of Wadebridge) appeared for the plaintiff; W David Spens (instructed by Windeatts, of Kingsbridge) appeared for the defendants.
