Definition
A rendre (Law French: "to render" or "to yield") is a term describing something that is to be rendered, yielded, or paid. In historical property law, it characterizes a class of profit or interest defined by the obligation to give something up or deliver something to another — as opposed to something taken or retained.
The term appears most frequently in the phrase profits à rendre, which encompasses rents and services owed from land. These are distinguished from profits à prendre, which are rights to take something (such as timber, fish, or game) from another's land. The distinction turns on direction: à rendre flows outward as an obligation to yield; à prendre flows inward as a right to extract.
Common Confusion
A rendre and à prendre are mirror-image concepts that are routinely conflated in historical sources and occasionally in modern commentary. Both are Law French property terms, both concern profits arising from land, and the words look similar enough to create transcription and indexing errors in older texts. The critical distinction: à prendre is a right to take from land (an incorporeal hereditament still recognized in modern common law); à rendre is an obligation to render or yield something — most commonly rents or services — and as a freestanding concept it has largely dissolved into the general law of landlord and tenant and real covenants. A researcher encountering either term in a historical document should confirm which direction the obligation runs before drawing conclusions about the nature of the interest.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter a rendre almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century sources dealing with feudal tenure, manorial obligations, and the classification of real property interests. The term does not survive as active legal vocabulary in modern American or English law, but it appears as an organizing concept in older treatises on real property and nisi prius practice — particularly in discussions of what kinds of profits or services were incident to land.
The primary research trap is misreading à rendre as à prendre (or vice versa) in manuscript sources, early printed reports, and digests where Law French abbreviations and typeface were inconsistent. Burrill and Black both place the definition of a rendre immediately adjacent to the maxim A rescriptis valet argumentum — a coincidence of alphabetical arrangement, not substantive connection — which can further confuse researchers scanning entries quickly.
Because profits à rendre comprehend both rents and services, this term is a useful entry point when researching the full scope of obligations attached to feudal tenures, copyhold interests, and early forms of landlord-tenant relationship. It connects the vocabulary of feudal incident to later doctrines of covenant running with the land.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on substance. All three sources define à rendre as "to render, to yield," gloss profits à rendre as comprehending rents and services, and cite Hammond's Nisi Prius (page 192 in the American edition) as authority. The entries are nearly identical across all three dictionaries, suggesting a shared source tradition rather than independent analysis.
None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on how profits à rendre were distinguished from other categories of real property interest in litigation, nor do they trace the decline of the term as feudal tenures were abolished or reformed. Researchers should not assume from the brevity of these entries that the concept was unimportant — its compactness in the dictionaries reflects the Law French tradition of compressed maxim-style entries, not marginal significance in the periods when feudal tenure structured land law.
Hammond's Nisi Prius, cited by all three sources, is a real treatise (William Garrow Hammond, compiler; the American edition was published in the early nineteenth century) and remains a legitimate historical reference for nisi prius practice and real property classification.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Profits à Prendre; Feudal Tenure and Incidents; Incorporeal Hereditaments.