12 Pa. 122 | Pa. | 1849
The opinion of this Court was delivered by
The Court below instructed the jury that as to the purparts of the land in question, to which the plaintiffs derive title through their late mother and under the conveyance from Strause and wife, their right to recover is barred by the Statute of Limitations. This instruction was based on the idea that, so far as these interests are involved, the case is one of successive disabilities, and consequently, as no action to recover the possession was instituted within ten years from the respective deaths of Sarah Marple and Eliza Vandike, the plaintiffs are not within the protection of the proviso saving the interests of femes covert and infants. But this opinion is founded in misapprehension of the position occupied by the plaintiffs. As a brief'recurrence to a well ascertained principle will show, they are not driven to claim the benefit of the proviso, except so far as that operated to prevent the running of the statute during the respective lives of their mother and aunt.
Notwithstanding there is some obscurity in the phraseology of our Act of Limitations and of the 21 Jac. 1, from which, so far as it respects land, it is substantially borrowed, it is settled by a series of determinations, that the spirit of these statutes is to allow the respective’ periods of 20 and 21 years from the time a person might make an entry or support an action; for though the owner be out of. possession, the statutes only begin to operate from the moment a right to enter accrues: Hall v. Vandegrift, 3 Binn. 374; Carlisle v. Carlisle, 1 Pa. R. 6; Cook v. Danvers, 7 East, 299. It is therefore said that one effect of these enactments has been to arrange claimants of lands into three different classes; namely, parties claiming presently the whole fee simple, of which they or their ancestors have been disseised; those claiming particular estates, and those claiming reversions or remainders expectant on the
In the case béfore us, the adverse possession, set up by the defendants, commenced during the coverture of the mother and aunt of the plaintiffs, whose titles were therefore as fully protected by the saving clause of the statute as if the lands, adversely held, had first descended upon them after their respective intermarriages: Carlisle v. Carlisle, supra; Weddle v. Robinson, 6 Watts, 486. The operation of the statute being thus suspended until their deaths, their estates were up to that period as unaffected by it, as though no hostile possession existed. Yet had an immediate right of entry then descended upon the plaintiffs and upon Mrs. Strause, as heirs of their respective mothers, they vrould have been put to their several actions for the recovery of the possession, within the ten years given by the Act. But in both cases a precedent estate for life vested in their respective fathers, and, intervening between the mothers and their children, suspended the latter’s right of entry, until the respective particular estates were expended by the death of the tenant, or a merger of his interest. Prior to this, there was no moment of time when the children of William Ilollman’s daughters could have entered upon the land without being trespassers, and, consequently, there was, under the principle I have brought to view, no such right residing in them as the Act of Limitations could affect. As to that portion of interest derived through Mrs. Yandike, the right of possession did not vest in her daughter,
Judgment reversed, and a venire facias de novo awarded.