Definition
Latin: "Against the form of the feoffment." A writ of medieval English law that lay for a tenant, or the tenant's heir, who had been enfeoffed of lands or tenements subject to conditions and whose tenure was being disturbed or denied in a manner contrary to the terms of the original grant. The writ was a procedural remedy designed to enforce the conditions of a feoffment — the formal conveyance of freehold land — against parties who acted in breach of those conditions. If the feoffment imposed particular obligations, restrictions, or modes of tenure, and a subsequent party acted against that form, the writ provided a means of judicial redress.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the dissolved vocabulary of medieval English real property law and will appear almost exclusively in sources predating the seventeenth century, with occasional reference in treatises synthesizing old English tenure doctrine. Researchers encountering it in historical records should treat it as a marker of feudal land conveyancing disputes rather than any continuing doctrine.
The Burrill entry for this term is fragmentary — the source text trails off mid-entry into adjacent Latin maxims (CONTRA LEGEM TERRÆ, Contra negantem principia, Contra non valentem agere), suggesting a printing or transcription error in the dictionary corpus. Researchers relying on the Burrill entry alone will not find a complete description of the writ's scope or procedure. Cross-referencing Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium and the early Year Books is advisable for fuller treatment.
The writ's practical significance dissolved with the abolition of feudal tenures in England. The Tenures Abolition Act 1660 eliminated most of the feudal framework within which feoffments and their conditions operated, rendering writs of this type obsolete as living procedural tools. Any appearance of this term in a research corpus after the mid-seventeenth century is almost certainly historical or doctrinal commentary, not active pleading.
Researchers should also note that the writ's function was narrow: it was not a general remedy for breach of conveyancing conditions, but specifically tied to the relationship between the form of the original feoffment and the tenure held under it. Conflating it with broader equitable doctrines around conditional conveyances is an error of period and conceptual category.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry but, as noted, the text is truncated, breaking off into adjacent maxims rather than completing the substantive description of the writ. What survives confirms the basic definition — a writ against conduct contrary to the form of a feoffment — but omits detail on procedure, parties, or the courts in which the writ was returnable.
The truncation in the Burrill text is a known hazard with historical dictionary sources in the Law Mind corpus: editorial decisions about page boundaries and alphabetical sequencing occasionally interrupt entries mid-treatment. Researchers should treat the Burrill entry here as a signpost rather than a complete account.
Broader historical dictionaries of English law, including Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary, may carry more complete treatments. The Registrum Brevium (Register of Writs) and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium are the primary sources for the writ's technical form.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ was exclusive to the English common law system and its feudal land tenure framework. It has no American equivalent and was never transplanted into colonial or post-colonial American jurisprudence in operative form. Its appearance in American legal research is therefore limited to historical and comparative contexts.