Definition
A charter of confirmation is a formal instrument used in Scots law to ratify and confirm a grantee's title to land, together with the sasine (symbolic act of possession) following upon it. The charter operated as an authoritative declaration by a superior — most often the Crown — that a prior conveyance or transaction was valid and that the grantee's rights in the subjects (the lands conveyed) were fully recognized and secured.
In the feudal land tenure system that governed Scots property law for centuries, land was held not in outright ownership but in tenure from a superior. When land changed hands, whether by sale, inheritance, or gift, the superior's acknowledgment of the new holder's title was a necessary step in completing that title. The charter of confirmation served that function. It did not itself create new rights so much as validate and entrench rights already constituted — hence the term "confirmation" rather than "grant."
---
Common Confusion
A charter of confirmation should not be confused with a charter of novodamus, another instrument in Scots feudal conveyancing. A charter of novodamus was issued when a superior wished to alter the terms or burdens of a tenure — effectively granting the lands anew on revised conditions. A charter of confirmation, by contrast, left the existing tenure unchanged and simply ratified what was already in place. Researchers encountering either document in historical Scottish title deeds should distinguish carefully between the two before drawing conclusions about the nature or terms of the holding.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This is primarily a term of historical Scots law, rooted in the feudal conveyancing system that Scotland maintained in recognizable form into the nineteenth century and, in attenuated form, until the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act 2000 came into force in 2004. Researchers working with Scottish title deeds, sasine registers, or estate records from any period before the abolition of the feudal system will encounter this instrument in its practical context.
Several navigational points deserve attention:
First, the term appears almost exclusively in Scottish legal sources. English law had no direct equivalent because English conveyancing developed along different lines; researchers should not import English common law doctrines to interpret this instrument.
Second, the Register of Sasines — Scotland's public register of land rights, established in 1617 — is the primary corpus for locating charters of confirmation in action. A charter of confirmation would ordinarily be followed by an instrument of sasine recorded in that register. The two documents together completed the grantee's title. Researchers tracing title chains in historical Scottish property records must account for both.
Third, the abolition of the feudal tenure system in 2004 rendered this instrument functionally obsolete for transactions after that date. Any modern Scottish conveyancing reference to "confirmation" almost certainly refers to confirmation of an executor's title to a deceased's estate — a procedurally and conceptually distinct matter entirely.
Fourth, because Bouvier's treatment is brief and oriented toward an American audience encountering Scots law secondhand, researchers requiring operational depth should move quickly to Scots-specific sources: Bell's Principles of the Law of Scotland, Erskine's Institute of the Law of Scotland, or Stair's Institutions of the Law of Scotland, all of which address feudal conveyancing instruments with the granularity that a title examination requires.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the only coverage among the source dictionaries, and it is minimal: a charter of confirmation is described as a document that "ratified and confirmed the purchaser's rights, and the sasine following upon it," identified explicitly as a term of Scots law. The entry does its job — it correctly locates the instrument within feudal conveyancing and identifies its ratifying function — but it offers no procedural detail, no discussion of who issued such charters, no treatment of the consequences of a defective confirmation, and no engagement with how the instrument operated alongside the sasine in completing title.
This brevity reflects Bouvier's general approach to Scots and civil law terms: acknowledge their existence for reference purposes, but do not attempt a full treatment. For a term of this kind, Bouvier is a starting point rather than a terminus.
No other source dictionary in the present compilation addresses this term, which itself signals the term's jurisdictionally narrow profile. Its absence from English legal dictionaries is historically correct, not a gap to be filled by inference.
---
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to Scots law and has no direct counterpart in English, Irish, or American law. Researchers working in a comparative context should treat it as a feudal Scots conveyancing instrument and resist analogizing it to confirmation instruments in other legal traditions, which may carry substantially different procedural requirements and legal effects.
---