Definition
A release "and feoffment" is a historical common law concept describing the legal effect produced when a disseisee (a person wrongfully dispossessed of land) releases his right to one of two joint disseisors. The release operates as if the disseisee had first re-entered the land — thereby ending the disseisin — and then made a fresh feoffment (a formal conveyance of a freehold estate) to that one disseisor alone. The result is that the recipient of the release becomes the sole seised owner and may exclude his former co-disseisor entirely.
The phrase captures a legal fiction: the release is treated not merely as a surrender of a claim, but as carrying the full conveyancing force of an actual re-entry followed by a new grant. This elevated the release beyond a simple quitclaim and gave it the power to sever a joint relationship between wrongdoers holding land.
Common Confusion
"And feoffment" describes the legal effect of a particular kind of release — it is not itself a distinct mode of conveyance. Researchers encountering the phrase should not treat it as a standalone deed type. It belongs to the doctrine of releases and operates as a term of art explaining how a release can function with the force of a feoffment without any formal livery of seisin being performed. Confusing it with an ordinary release (which merely relinquishes a claim) or with a feoffment proper (which required physical delivery of possession) will produce a misreading of the source.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern common law materials — primarily in treatises, abridgments, and commentaries on real property conveyancing from the medieval through the early modern period. Blackstone's Commentaries is the key reference point (2 Bl. Comm. 324–325), and most dictionary entries are essentially paraphrases of that passage.
Researchers working in colonial American land records, early English chancery materials, or historical property disputes may encounter releases described in terms of their "and feoffment" effect. The phrase signals that the drafter understood the release to carry conveyancing force, not merely to extinguish a personal claim. Missing this distinction can cause a researcher to underestimate the legal weight of the instrument being examined.
The concept also matters for understanding the historical relationship between disseisin and title. In medieval land law, disseisin created a possessory right in the disseisor that could be dealt with by the disseisee through several legal mechanisms. The "and feoffment" effect was one doctrine that allowed informal resolution of competing possessory claims without resort to litigation — a significant practical device in periods when formal entry and re-enfeoffment were costly or dangerous.
Be alert to the fact that Burrill's entry appears to be fragmentary in surviving sources; his text trails into a partial discussion of relinquishment of rights in lands, which may reflect a damaged or abbreviated original. Researchers relying solely on Burrill without cross-referencing Blackstone directly may receive an incomplete picture.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's and Burrill's track the same Blackstone passage with minimal variation, confirming that by the time these dictionaries were compiled the concept had no living doctrinal development — it was already a historical artifact being preserved for reference rather than active practice.
Blackstone himself uses the concept to illustrate the broader doctrine that releases can enlarge an estate or extinguish a right with the full force of a formal conveyance where the releasee already holds a possessory interest. The "and feoffment" framing is Blackstone's analytical gloss, not a term found in the deed itself.
Neither dictionary source adds substantially to Blackstone, and neither addresses how American jurisdictions received or modified the doctrine. Given that disseisin-based land title disputes largely gave way to statutory ejectment and recording act regimes in the nineteenth century, the doctrine had little occasion to be tested or refined in American courts.
Jurisdictional Note
The concept is English common law in origin and has no meaningful independent existence in modern American or Commonwealth property law. Any appearance in American materials will be in historical context or in treatises explaining inherited English doctrine.