Definition
In old English law, a commissor was the party who entrusted land to another person to hold at the commissor's pleasure. The term describes the grantor or entrustor in a precarious or at-will arrangement — one who delivered land into another's custody without surrendering ultimate control or permanent title. The commissor retained the right to recall the land when he chose.
The term is the functional counterpart to the recipient in such arrangements. Where one party holds at another's pleasure, the commissor is the party whose pleasure governs.
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Common Confusion
COMMISSOR should not be confused with COMMISSIONER, a wholly unrelated modern term denoting a person appointed to exercise public or delegated authority. The resemblance is purely superficial. Commissor is a narrow term of feudal property law; commissioner belongs to administrative and procedural law. In historical manuscripts and legal texts, especially those transcribed or printed in condensed form, the two words have occasionally been misread or conflated due to their orthographic similarity.
Commissor also differs from COMMITTER in its technical sense. Though Burrill translates commissor as "committer," the English word committer carries baggage from criminal and procedural contexts (one who commits an act, or a court committing a person to custody) that the Latin commissor does not carry. When reading old Latin pleadings or treatises, commissor should be understood in the land-entrustment sense, not in any punitive or custodial sense.
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Why It Matters in Research
Commissor is a term of limited but precise application. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in:
1. FEUDAL TENURE AND PRECARIUM RESEARCH. The commissor relationship maps closely onto the Roman precarium — a grant of possession revocable at the grantor's will — and onto analogous arrangements in early English land law. Fleta, the late thirteenth-century legal treatise from which Burrill draws his reference, is the primary English source for this usage. Any researcher working through Fleta's treatment of land custody (lib. 5, c. 5) will need this term to understand the relationship being described.
2. READING LATIN LEGAL TEXTS. Commissor appears in Latin legal records, pleadings, and treatises in both the classical Roman law tradition and medieval English sources. The Latin dictionary sense — perpetrator — is the classical meaning, but that meaning should not be imported into a feudal property context. Context controls. A researcher encountering commissor in a land dispute or tenure document should read it as the entrusting party, not as a wrongdoer.
3. DISTINGUISHING PARTIES IN AT-WILL ARRANGEMENTS. In early English tenure documents that describe conditional or revocable grants, the commissor is the superior party — the one whose ongoing consent makes the holding legitimate. This is functionally significant: the commissor's death, changed will, or legal incapacity would affect the grantee's right to continue holding. Research into disputes over such holdings requires understanding which party was the commissor and what rights attached to that role.
The corpus of sources using this term is narrow. Do not expect to find commissor in modern legal materials. It is a medievalism, encountered in primary Latin sources and in the historical dictionaries that gloss them.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only English-language legal dictionary treatment in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill defines commissor as "[a] committer; one who committed or entrusted land to another to hold during his pleasure," citing Fleta directly. The definition is brief but accurate to its source. Burrill correctly identifies this as old English law and supplies the Latin origin (committere) and the Fleta citation (lib. 5, c. 5, § 18).
No broader analytical treatment is available from the historical dictionary sources in this corpus. The Latin dictionary entry confirms the classical Latin root meaning — perpetrator, from Ennodius — which establishes that the property-law sense is a specialized medieval legal adaptation of a more general Latin word, not a term that ever had a free-standing technical meaning in classical Roman law as such.
What the historical sources do not address: the relationship between the commissor and analogous figures in Roman law (the deponent in precarium grants, for example), and whether the English commissor carried rights or duties beyond mere revocability. Those questions require primary source research in Fleta and in Roman law antecedents such as the Digest's treatment of precarium.
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Jurisdictional Note
Commissor is a term of English legal history with roots in Roman and medieval Continental legal traditions. It has no meaningful modern jurisdictional variation because it is not a term of active law in any contemporary system. Scottish and Continental civil law sources that engage with Roman precarium doctrine may use cognate terms; researchers working in comparative legal history should be attentive to equivalent concepts in those traditions without assuming direct terminological identity.
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