It was a long time ago since I studied this stuff (so I may have misremembered a few things), but I just want to say two things. The first is to just respond t

It was a long time ago since I studied this stuff (so I may have misremembered a few things), but I just want to say two things. The first is to just respond to the comment about etymological approach to understanding the law. The stuff I was saying earlier, all came from original source material. The class consisted of us reading line by line copies of manuscripts, with our professor translating as we go. So it was absolutely not an etymological approach to the law, and was based on direct translation of source material. The second point is that it was our professor who argued that fee (and fief, feof, <whatever>), the legal word that signifies possession, ultimately comes from where you put your foot, and he was an expert in law, Saxon and other dead languages. If that doesn’t correspond to whatever is on Wikipedia (or insert online source here) then either Wikipedia is incomplete, or I’m not perfectly representing what he said. Probably that I’m not perfectly representing what he said. Nonetheless, in the context of adverse possession, the larger point wasn’t about the etymology per se, but that historically, in England, you must physically possess your land in order to be able to claim that it’s really yours. This was the ultimate meaning of my professor’s point, and that point still remains. I don’t have any of those sources in front of me, but one day I’ll dig that stuff up and do a larger write up on these points.