''Bass v Gregory'' (1890) is an
English tort law
English tort law concerns the compensation for harm to people's rights to health and safety, a clean environment, property, their economic interests, or their reputations. A "tort" is a wrong in civil, rather than criminal law, that usually requ ...
and
English land law case, concerning a ventilation shaft on under or through adjoining land (a "passage of air"). It was deemed an
easement by prescription
An easement is a nonpossessory right to use and/or enter onto the real property of another without possessing it. It is "best typified in the right of way which one landowner, A, may enjoy over the land of another, B". An easement is a propert ...
, having been used without long interruptions for forty years. At the time of the case, the law, and the leading judge made a fine technical distinction between prescription by statute and by the common law doctrine of lost modern grant.
Facts
Bass and her tenant owned a pub called ''The Jolly Anglers'' in Meadow Road,
Beeston,
Nottingham
Nottingham ( , locally ) is a city and unitary authority area in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, England. It is located north-west of London, south-east of Sheffield and north-east of Birmingham. Nottingham has links to the legend of Robi ...
. They brought a claim against the owner of neighbouring land (including the cottage in which he lived), Gregory, for blocking a ventilation shaft out of Bass' cellar. Bass brewed beer in the cellar, and the ventilation shaft allowed the fumes to run out of the cellar, through the ground, which connected to Gregory's
water well
A well is an excavation or structure created in the ground by digging, driving, or drilling to access liquid resources, usually water. The oldest and most common kind of well is a water well, to access groundwater in underground aquifers. T ...
, out of which the air escaped. The shaft had existed for at least 40 years.
Judgment
Pollock B held that Bass had a right to the passage, because the law deemed that if a right had been exercised for a long number of years, there was a legal foundation to the right. He said the following.
[(1890) 25 QBD 481, 482-484]
See also
*
English land law
Notes
{{reflist, 2
References
*RH Coase, ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ (1960) 3 Journal of Law and Economics 1, 14
English land case law
1890 in case law
1890 in British law