Definition
Latin: "without rendering anything therefrom." A phrase used in English crown grants to indicate that the grantee holds the property free of any rent or service obligation running back to the Crown. Where a grant was made absque aliquo inde redendo, the recipient owed nothing in return — no rent, no fealty, no periodic render of any kind. The grant was, in effect, a pure conveyance with no reservation attached.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in early English land grant materials and abridgments, not in modern legal instruments. Researchers will encounter it in pre-modern conveyancing records, Crown patents, and in the older English abridgments — particularly Rolle's Abridgment, where Black's traces it directly. Its significance is narrow: the phrase signals the absence of a tenurial reservation, which was legally meaningful in a feudal system where the default assumption was that land held from the Crown carried some obligation of service or render. Spotting this phrase in a grant document tells a researcher that no such obligation was imposed, and that the tenure was intended to be free of encumbrance in that specific respect.
Researchers working in colonial American land grant history may also encounter this phrase or its functional equivalents in early Crown patents, where the question of whether land was held freely or subject to quit-rents was frequently contested. The phrase does not appear in modern property records or statutes, and its use in any contemporary instrument would be an archaism.
Because the phrase is a term of art embedded in the feudal tenurial framework, it cannot be fully understood without reference to the broader vocabulary of tenure — fee simple, serjeanty, frankalmoin, and the various services (knight service, socage) that grants could reserve or waive. The absence of a render was not a trivial formality; it defined the relationship between grantor and grantee in a system where land holding was fundamentally relational.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines the phrase concisely as "without rendering anything therefrom" and notes its specific application to Crown grants reserving no rent, citing 2 Rolle, Abr. 502. The entry is brief by design — the phrase has a single, narrow function. No significant definitional divergence exists across historical sources because the term is so precisely bounded. What historical dictionaries do not elaborate is the practical significance of the phrase within the feudal tenurial hierarchy: why the absence of a render mattered, and what its presence or absence signaled about the nature of the tenure. Researchers should consult treatises on feudal land law — Littleton's Tenures and Coke's commentary thereon — for that surrounding context, as dictionary entries alone do not reconstruct the framework within which this phrase operated.