Definition
Conveyances are the legal instruments, documents, and formal transactions by which ownership or an interest in real property is transferred from one party to another. The term operates both as a noun of plurality — referring to multiple such instruments — and as a term of art in property law describing the broad category of legal mechanisms that pass title or create property interests.
In its broadest sense, a conveyance is any written instrument (deed, lease, mortgage, assignment, or similar document) that transfers an interest in land. In narrower historical usage, "conveyances" specifically referred to the recognized common law methods by which freehold estates were originally created or first brought into existence — the so-called "original" or "primary" conveyances, as distinguished from derivative or secondary ones.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "conveyance" — the act or means of transporting something from one place to another, or a vehicle used for that purpose.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Conveyance in ordinary speech meant the act of carrying or transmitting, or a vehicle or carriage for transport.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant. In everyday English, conveyances are vehicles or acts of physical transport. In property law, the term refers exclusively to legal instruments transferring interests in land — nothing is physically moved. A researcher encountering "conveyance" in a legal source should not import any sense of physical movement or transportation.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Historical common law distinguished two main classes:
Original (or Primary) Conveyances — those by which a freehold estate was first created and arose for the first time. These included feoffment, gift, grant, lease, exchange, and partition.
Derivative (or Secondary) Conveyances — those that presupposed an existing estate and operated upon it, transferring or modifying it. These included release, confirmation, surrender, assignment, and defeasance.
Statutory conveyances — instruments operating under the Statute of Uses (1536) or equivalent enabling legislation, such as the bargain and sale, covenant to stand seised, and lease and release, which became the dominant conveyancing forms in practice after the sixteenth century and largely displaced the older common law forms.
Why It Matters in Research
The term "conveyances" carries different weight depending on the era of the source. In materials predating the nineteenth century, it frequently signals the classical common law taxonomy of original versus derivative conveyances — a distinction that organized property law treatises for centuries but has little operational significance in modern practice. Researchers working in colonial American land records, early English chancery materials, or eighteenth-century property treatises need to recognize when "conveyances" is being used in this technical taxonomic sense.
In modern sources, "conveyances" is a catch-all for any instruments of transfer and the earlier classification is rarely invoked. The shift matters: a Blackstone-era source distinguishing types of conveyances is doing something analytically different from a modern recorder's office log listing conveyances filed.
Cross-corpus trap: Deed and conveyance are often used interchangeably in modern practice, but historically a deed was one species of conveyance, not synonymous with it. A lease, for example, was a conveyance that did not necessarily take the form of a deed under seal in all periods. Collapsing the two terms when reading older sources will cause analytical errors.
Jurisdictional variation is also important for corpus work. American states adopted varying statutory frameworks for conveyancing after independence, and the old common law forms (feoffment, fine, recovery) were abolished at different times in different jurisdictions. An American source from 1820 may assume a different operative landscape than an English source of the same date.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier defines conveyances narrowly in the entry provided, citing Blackstone: "those common law conveyances, by means of which an estate is created or first arises." This is the technical sense of original conveyances, which Blackstone treats in Book II of the Commentaries. Bouvier's framing reflects the classical common law taxonomy and does not encompass the full modern range of the term.
What Bouvier's entry misses — or addresses elsewhere — is the broader operative category of all instruments transferring property interests, which by Bouvier's own era had largely absorbed the older classification into a more functional, document-centered vocabulary. The narrow Bouvier definition is an artifact of the Blackstonian pedagogical framework rather than a complete picture of how the term functioned in conveyancing practice.
Jurisdictional Note
American jurisdictions abolished most of the antique common law conveyancing forms (feoffment by livery of seisin, fine, common recovery) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, replacing them with statutory deed requirements. Researchers working with American land records should expect references to conveyances to mean recorded deed instruments, not classical common law forms, by the mid-nineteenth century in most states.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Property Law — Transfer of Title; Deeds and Recording Acts; Estates in Land.