Definition
A covenant collateral is a covenant in a deed or conveyance that relates to some matter ancillary or incidental to the main subject of the grant — that is, it concerns something that does not directly touch or concern the land or property being conveyed. A classic example is a covenant to pay a sum of money in gross (a lump sum unconnected to the property itself). The covenant exists alongside the grant but is not integral to the estate created by it.
Covenant collateral stands in contrast to a covenant running with the land, which is so connected to the property that it binds successors in title. A collateral covenant binds only the original covenantor personally, as a matter of contract, and does not attach to or travel with the land.
Common Confusion
COVENANT COLLATERAL vs. COVENANT RUNNING WITH THE LAND. These two categories are easily conflated because both arise in the same instrument — a deed or conveyance — and both impose obligations on a covenantor. The critical distinction is whether the covenant "touches and concerns" the land. A covenant running with the land does touch and concern it, binds successors, and has doctrinal requirements (including privity of estate) that must be satisfied for it to run. A covenant collateral does not touch and concern the land; it is merely a personal contractual undertaking made in the context of a conveyance. Breach of a covenant running with the land may be enforced by or against successors; breach of a covenant collateral is enforceable only between the original contracting parties.
COVENANT COLLATERAL vs. COVENANT IN GROSS. These terms overlap but are not identical. A covenant in gross is specifically a covenant that benefits or burdens a party personally rather than any parcel of land. A covenant collateral is the broader category: it encompasses any covenant that does not directly concern the thing granted, which includes covenants in gross but may also include other incidental undertakings.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is largely a creature of classic English conveyancing doctrine and appears most prominently in historical sources dealing with real property and deed construction. Researchers working with pre-twentieth-century deeds, land grants, or conveyancing treatises will encounter it regularly; modern property law has substantially absorbed the concept into the broader framework of real covenants and equitable servitudes without always preserving the terminology.
The key navigational trap is anachronism: modern researchers accustomed to the running covenant / equitable servitude framework may not immediately recognize "covenant collateral" as a recognized term of art when it surfaces in older instruments or case law. Courts interpreting historical deeds may rely on this distinction to determine whether a covenant binds a current landowner or only the original grantor or grantee.
The practical consequence of classification as collateral rather than running is significant: a plaintiff seeking to enforce such a covenant against a remote successor in title will face a threshold obstacle at the deed interpretation stage. This makes the historical/doctrinal context of the term directly relevant to litigation strategy in title disputes, quiet title actions, and real property contract disputes involving older chains of title.
Researchers using this dictionary in connection with Law Mind corpus materials should note that the term does not appear in modern codifications with any regularity. Its life in primary sources is almost exclusively in common law jurisdictions following English conveyancing practice, and the leading doctrinal authority cited in both historical dictionaries — Sheppard's Touchstone of Common Assurances — is itself a seventeenth-century English treatise. That provenance places the term firmly in the pre-statutory, common law layer of Anglo-American real property doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in near-verbatim agreement on this term, with both entries tracing directly to Sheppard's Touchstone of Common Assurances (ch. 161). The shared language — "conversant about some collateral thing that doth nothing at all, or not so immediately concern the thing granted" — reflects the historical dictionary compilers' common reliance on the same classical conveyancing source rather than independent synthesis.
Both entries use the payment of a sum of money in gross as the paradigm example, which usefully anchors the abstraction: a covenant in a deed obligating the grantee to pay the grantor a fixed sum, unrelated to any rental, use, or condition of the land, is the cleanest instance of a collateral covenant.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the remedial consequence of the classification — whether the covenant is enforceable only in personam, the treatment of breach in equity, or how courts determined "collateralness" at the margins. Researchers needing that doctrinal depth should consult primary conveyancing treatises and nineteenth-century English and American equity decisions on covenants running with the land.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is rooted in English common law conveyancing and was received into American property law through that tradition. Modern American jurisdictions have largely replaced the collateral/running distinction with statutory or Restatement-based frameworks for real covenants and equitable servitudes, but the historical classification remains operative when interpreting pre-modern deeds and instruments governed by the law at the time of execution.