Miles v Easter [1933] Ch 611
Property law – Restrictive covenants
Facts
Company S bought some land and mortgaged it to a bank. They later sold a part of this land to B. As part of the sale of land, there was a deed which contained restrictive covenants to not do anything on the land that might be a nuisance to the vendors, nor to construct a pub or hotel on the property. This was applicable to B and to subsequent owners of the land. The plaintiff later received the title of the land via the executors of B’s will, after B had died. Later, the defendant bought land from Company S and subsequently conveyed this to fifteen people. The defendant later sought to enforce the restrictive covenants and appealed the decision of the trial judge who prevented this at the first instance.
Issue
The court was required to establish whether the covenant from the earlier conveyancing was annexed to the plot of retained land, a portion of the land or not to any of the lands in question. This would allow the court to establish whether the restrictive covenant could be considered as enforceable by the defendants against the plaintiff. In doing this, it was important for the court to establish whether the benefit of the covenant had been expressly assigned to the plaintiff.
Held
The Court of Appeal affirmed the original decision of the trial judge and dismissed the appeal. The court held that the defendants could not enforce the restrictive covenants against the plaintiffs as there was no evidence that the benefit of the restrictive covenant had been annexed to the plaintiff’s land.
Updated 20 March 2026
This case summary accurately describes the decision in Miles v Easter [1933] Ch 611, a Court of Appeal authority on the running of the benefit of restrictive covenants in equity. The core legal principles it illustrates — that the benefit of a restrictive covenant must be annexed to the land, expressly assigned, or pass under a building scheme in order to be enforceable by a successor in title — remain good law. Subsequent developments are worth noting for completeness. The decision in Federated Homes Ltd v Mill Lodge Properties Ltd [1980] 1 WLR 594 significantly relaxed the requirements for annexation, holding that general words in a conveyance, combined with s.78 of the Law of Property Act 1925, could effect statutory annexation without express language attaching the covenant to each and every part of the retained land. This limits the practical scope of the stricter approach in Miles v Easter, though the case remains relevant to the law’s historical development and is still regularly cited in this context. Students should be aware that the law on annexation, assignment, and building schemes has been further refined by cases such as Roake v Chadha [1984] 1 WLR 40, which confirmed that s.78 annexation can be excluded by contrary intention in the conveyancing documents. No statutory changes have materially altered the underlying framework. The article is therefore broadly accurate as a statement of what the case decided, but readers should situate it within the broader modern law on the running of restrictive covenant benefits.
