In the old Action of Ejectment the pair were most active. So strange were their gambols that even the lay world was impressed. In the early years of Victoria John and Richard were common butts of popular satire. Nothing seemed more gratuitous, more idly superfluous; but, turn to their history, and you find how important and how serviceable were the parts they once played. One must begin far back. In early feudal times the cultivator of another's land was either a serf or a person of no importance, holding at his lord's will. The tenant's position improved with the times, leases were granted, and if their conditions were broken, a Writ of Covenant, as the form of action was called, secured him in possession, and gave him damages for his wrongs. But this action lay, as the technical term is, between the original parties alone; so that if he were turned out by a complete stranger, or by a person claiming through another grant of the same landlord, his remedy was merely pecuniary. In the time of Henry III. a writ was invented giving him full protection against anyone interfering under colour of another lease from his lord: but the case of an Ouster (or dispossession) by an utter stranger was not adequately provided for until the beginning of Edward III.'s reign, when the writ of _Ejectio Firmæ_, or ejectment, was adapted from the proceeding in trespass. It called upon the wrong-doer of every species to show why, "with force and arms," he had entered on and taken possession of the plaintiff's land. But, again, the result was only money damages: so that he was driven for relief to the equitable jurisdiction of the Chancellor, who, by injunctions and so forth, secured him in, or restored him to, possession of the very land itself. Presently the Common Law Courts took it ill that so much of their legitimate business should go elsewhere; and, at the end of the fifteenth century, they allowed the term itself, as well as damages for the Ouster, to be recovered under a Writ of Ejectment, and this remedy was held proper against every species of wrong-doer.