Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "passing" or "running." In its legal application, CORAUNT described a type of grant or conveyance — typically of land or property rights — that passed or ran for a defined duration or estate, whether for life, for a term of years, or in fee. The term appears in connection with grants issuing from religious houses, where property rights were said to "run" from the grantor institution to the grantee.
Why It Matters in Research
CORAUNT is a term a researcher will encounter almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records, monastic cartularies, and conveyancing instruments predating systematic common law consolidation. Because it derives from Law French and describes a category of grant rather than a standalone legal concept, it rarely appears as a headword in later English legal dictionaries and is largely absent from post-seventeenth century legal literature.
Researchers working in pre-Reformation ecclesiastical property records or early English land tenure disputes should treat CORAUNT as a descriptive term of conveyancing art rather than a term of independent legal doctrine. Its significance lies in what it signals about the instrument: that a right or estate was being transferred in a running or continuous manner from a grantor — often a religious foundation — rather than being a fixed or one-time disposition. The reference to religious houses in Burrill's source (Kelham) is particularly important: much of the corpus material where this term surfaces will involve ecclesiastical landholding, and researchers should cross-reference monastic grant records, episcopal registers, and Chancery proceedings where such grants were later disputed following the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
The term's structural pattern is that of historical evolution — or more precisely, historical attrition. CORAUNT did not evolve into a modern legal concept; it simply fell out of use as Law French was displaced and conveyancing vocabulary was standardized. Do not expect to find it in post-1700 legal materials without it being a direct quotation or gloss on an older instrument.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source locating this term, drawing on Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), which remains one of the few reference works to have catalogued Law French terms used in English legal instruments. Burrill's entry is notably fragmentary — the surviving text suggests that the original entry addressed not only the linguistic meaning ("passing; running") but also the practical context of grants from religious houses, though the full entry appears to have been truncated in transmission.
No corresponding entry appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or Black's Law Dictionary in its early editions, suggesting CORAUNT was already considered too archaic for practical inclusion by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This absence is itself informative: the term's survival in Burrill reflects his unusually thorough attention to Law French vocabulary drawn from Kelham, rather than any continued doctrinal relevance at the time of Burrill's writing.
Researchers should note that Kelham's work, while invaluable for Law French glossing, was not itself a legal dictionary in the doctrinal sense, and definitions derived through that chain — Kelham to Burrill — should be treated as linguistic glosses on archaic usage rather than authoritative statements of legal effect.
Jurisdictional Note
CORAUNT is specific to English legal history and has no recognized counterpart in Scots, Irish, or American legal traditions. Its relevance is confined to English medieval and early modern property and ecclesiastical law.