Lord Sumner :-

Their Lordships do not desire to hear the respond ents. The point arising for deci sion on this appeal is a short one. In the group of suits, which the appellants brought in India, the question which, for the purposes of to-day, was the material one to be considered was this :- At what date is the under-tenure, of which they had become purchasers at a sale under a decree for rent, to be taken to have originated ?

It was in connection with a prayer to have encumbrances cleared off that this question arose, and according to the date fixed, earlier or later, they would be able to clear off more encumbrances or fewer.

Now to ascertain the date, at which a particular holding first began to be held as a definite hold ing, is essentially a question of fact, and must depend on evidence. That evidence may be, and naturally is, documentary, but the documents admitted in evidence upon that question are really historical materials, and although they have to be construed, and if possible understood, they are not to be treated as involving issues of law merely because they have to be construed. It is not as though they were being construed as instruments of title, or were con tracts or statutes, or otherwise the direct foundation of rights.

The Subordinate Judge, who tried a number of these suits, came to the conclusion that the date at which the under-tenure purchased by the plaintiffs had first arisen was the 6th March, 1884. Some others were heard by the Munsif, who came to a contrary conclusion. They were all consolidated and came before the District Judge, and the finding of the District Judge affirmed that of the Sub ordinate Judge, not in every respect upon the same grounds in detail, but substantially upon the same lines.

The case was then appealed to the High Court, When first it came before the High Court, that tribunal contented itself with observing that the issues which are now before their Lordships raised questions of some nicety, and pro ceeded to dispose of the appeal upon a different ground, which need not be further enlarged upon. That judgment of the High Court was brought before their Lordships and was reversed, and so the case came to be remitted to India to be finally disposed of, and on the second occasion the High Court dealt with the issues now in ques tion, which they had previously said little about, and briefly con curred in the view taken by the District Judge.

Now if the question before the District Judge was one of fact, ad mittedly there is an end of the matter. The District Judge, having to fix a date, fixed this particular date as being the date at which a certain ruffinama or compromise was arrived at, under circumstan ces which are not very clear, for no oral evidence was called, but which he thought he could sufficiently infer from the contents of the ruffinama and from some previous documents of earlier date. He came to the conclusion that there was at that time a dispute, the gist of which was, whether the tenant was right in claiming that all the land of which he was in possession was held on ghatwali tenure, or whether the Zamindar was right in contending that but a small portion of that land was held on ghatwali tenure and the rest was really mal land.

This is the dispute which was compromised in the ruffinama ; and the conclusion which the District Judge, agreeing therein with the Subordinate Judge, arrived at was that upon that occasion the parties solved this dispute by deciding that the amount of ghatwali land was less than it was claimed to be ; and that, in addition to what was ad mittedly mal land, some further land should be regarded as and held as mal laud, and so the matter end ed. Thereupon, he held that it was from that date, and in conse quence of that compromise, that the present under-tenure relating to some of these mal lands, of which the plaintiffs were the pur chasers, came into existence as a separate tenure.

There had been produced a series of documents, of earlier date,