Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "against the form of the feoffment." Contra formam feoffamenti names both a legal principle and the writ that enforced it: a remedy available to a tenant, or the tenant's heir, who had been enfeoffed of land by a lord under a charter specifying particular services, and who was subsequently distrained — that is, subjected to seizure of goods or chattels — for services greater than or different from those named in the charter. The writ required the lord to justify the excess distress or face compelled adherence to the original terms of the grant.
The principle is simply that a feoffment is a contractual instrument. Once a lord granted land by charter and fixed the tenant's obligations in writing, he was bound to those terms. Demanding more was an actionable wrong, correctable by writ.
Common Language
This term has no meaningful common English usage. It is pure feudal legal Latin, and no Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 entry applies. The section is omitted accordingly.
Common Confusion
Contra formam feoffamenti is sometimes loosely conflated with two other writs bearing similar Latin structures. First, contra formam collationis, which lay against a grantee of a church advowson who alienated the benefice contrary to the terms of the original grant — a related but ecclesiastically-focused remedy. Second, formedon, which also invoked the form of a gift or grant to enforce entail conditions. The connecting logic is the same — the original written instrument controls — but the context, parties, and procedural mechanics differ. Researchers encountering any of these writs in historical records should confirm which writ is actually at issue before treating the authorities as interchangeable.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is rare in modern legal writing and will be encountered almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century sources: English plea rolls, Year Books, Bracton-era treatises, and early American colonial land records that carried forward English feudal forms. Several navigational cautions apply.
First, spelling variation is significant. Historical sources render the full phrase as contra formam feoffamenti, contra formam feoffamentum, or abbreviated simply as contra formam, which is ambiguous without context. Bouvier's headword MENTI (a fragment of feoffamenti) illustrates how badly truncated these entries can appear in older dictionary formats. Researchers searching historical databases should run multiple spelling variants.
Second, the writ belongs to a cluster of feudal distress remedies that became practically obsolete in England well before formal abolition of feudal tenure incidents. In the American colonies, where fee simple grants without seignorial reservation were standard, the writ had almost no practical application. Its appearance in American legal dictionaries is largely antiquarian.
Third, the writ's logic survives in modern landlord-tenant and contract doctrine — the idea that a written instrument defining obligations limits the obligee to those obligations — but modern researchers should not cite this writ as live authority. Its value is historical and conceptual.
Fourth, researchers working on feudal land tenure, manorial court records, or the history of distress as a remedy will find this writ a useful index point for understanding how written charters constrained lord-tenant relations long before general contract doctrine developed to do the same work.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive entry among the shelf sources, and its treatment is brief. The definition accurately identifies the writ's function: tenant enfeoffed under a charter specifying services, subsequently distrained for more than the charter required. Bouvier notes the extension to the tenant's heir, which is significant — the protection ran with the land, not merely with the original grantee. This confirms that the charter of feoffment operated as an instrument binding successors on both sides of the feudal relationship.
What Bouvier does not address is the writ's procedural history: its origins in the common law courts' effort to provide a remedy outside the manorial court itself, where the lord who was doing the overreaching also presided. The writ thus represents an early instance of royal common law courts asserting supervisory jurisdiction over feudal relationships — a dynamic with considerable long-term significance for English legal development. Historical dictionaries generally treat the writ in isolation without flagging this institutional dimension.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ belongs entirely to English common law and the feudal land system transplanted, in attenuated form, to some American colonies. It has no operative modern jurisdiction. Where feudal tenure incidents were formally abolished — England by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660, American states by various constitutional and statutory provisions — the writ became a dead letter. Researchers should treat it as historical rather than comparative doctrine.