Odger's English Common Law

"market overt." 21
third person gets possession of such chattel and sells it
without the consent of the owner, the buyer will get no better
title than that which the seller had. The property in the
chattel remains in the original owner, who can recover it
from the buyer.
To this general rule there is one important exception-
This exception, which owed its origin to the customary law
of merchants, was well recognised as part of the common law
by the end of the fifteenth century, and is thus declared in
section 22 of the Sale of Good Act, 1893 x : "Where
goods
are sold in market overt according to the usage of the market,
the buyer acquires a title to the goods, provided that he buys
them in good faith and without notice of any defect or want
of title on the part of the seller."
By " market overt " is meant a public market or fair
legally held by grant from the Crown or by prescription, or
probably by authority of Parliament. By the custom of
London every shop in the City in which goods are publicly
exposed for sale is market overt on all days of the week
(except Sundays and holidays) from sunrise to sunset. It
is, however, only market overt for such things as the owner
professes to trade in, and the sale to be a sale in market
overt must take place in that part of the shop to which the
public are ordinarily admitted. 2
A sale in market overt by a man who has merely possession
of the goods of another will divest that other of his pro-
perty in the goods and vest it in the purchaser. But if the
goods were stolen and the thief is prosecuted to conviction by
the true owner, the property thereupon revests in him notwithstanding
any intermediate sale in market overt. A
different rule prevails where possession of the goods has been
obtained from the owner by fraud or other wrongful means
not amounting to theft; the property in such goods will not
revest in the owner by reason only of the conviction of the
offender. 3
1 56 & 57 Vict. o. 71.
2 Hargreave v. Spink, [1892] 1 Q. B. 25.
8 Sale of Goods Act, 1893, s. 24 (2). See further as to this distinction, post, p. 799