Book excerpt: The Historical Roots of English Land Law. Originally published: London: Oxford University Press, 1927. xxiv, 339 pp. One of the most distinguished historians of English common law, Holdsworth produced this manual to provide students of real property with a concise history of the field. This background was necessary, he argued, because contemporary land law was hard to comprehend apart from its history. "[Holdsworth] has cheerfully carried through the task of giving us an elementary survey of one part of the vast subject in the mastery of which he stands alone. Most writers of manuals have to popularize the results of the labour of others; Professor Holdsworth need pillage few storehouses but his own." --Law Quarterly Review 44: (1928) 105. William S. Holdsworth [1871-1944] was a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Cambridge from 1903-1966 and became the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford in 1922. He is well-known for his monumental A History of English Law (1903-1966) and other works, such as Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (1929) and Some Makers of English Law (1938).