Definition
De conventione is a Latin phrase meaning "of agreement" or "concerning a covenant." In historical English legal practice, it refers to a form of action — specifically, a writ or plea grounded upon a covenant or private agreement between parties. The term is most commonly encountered in the context of real property actions where a covenant running with the land is at issue, and in older procedural contexts designating the basis of a claim as arising from a private convention or agreement rather than from tort or statute.
The action de conventione was one of the recognized forms by which a party could seek enforcement of, or damages for breach of, a formal agreement, particularly where the agreement touched upon land rights or obligations between a lessor, reversioner, remainderman, or a stranger to the original conveyance.
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Common Confusion
De conventione is sometimes conflated with the general action of covenant (the common law writ of covenant), but the two are not identical. The writ of covenant was a broader procedural vehicle; de conventione more precisely identifies the subject matter — the agreement itself — as the foundation of the action. Researchers may also encounter confusion with "de conventionis" (a variant spelling) and should treat both as referring to the same underlying concept in historical sources.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially archaic procedural Latin and appears almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century legal materials, English Year Books, early American common law pleading texts, and digests of real property law. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in modern case law except in quotations from historical instruments or in academic treatments of the forms of action.
The primary research trap is the Rapalje & Lawrence cross-reference structure: the entry directs the reader to "CONVEN-" without completing the word, suggesting the full treatment appears under a related headword (likely COVENANT or CONVENTION) elsewhere in that dictionary. Researchers using Rapalje & Lawrence should follow that internal cross-reference rather than treating the de conventione entry as self-contained.
The mention of "lessor, reversioner, remainderman or stranger" in the Rapalje & Lawrence entry is significant: it signals that the action was available not only to original parties to a covenant but potentially to those who held derivative interests in the land. This connects the term to the broader historical debate over who could maintain an action on a covenant — a question that animated early real property law and influenced the development of the doctrine of privity of contract.
When researching chain-of-title disputes, historical lease disputes, or early American real property pleading, encountering de conventione signals that the drafter or court was invoking the formal, Latin-inflected vocabulary of English common law pleading rather than the modernized American forms. This is a useful dating and provenance marker for primary source documents.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence (1883) provides a minimal direct entry, cross-referencing the reader to a fuller discussion under a headword beginning "CONVEN-" — almost certainly COVENANT or CONVENTION. The fragment that survives in the entry identifies the parties relevant to the action: lessor, reversioner, remainderman, and stranger. This is consistent with the treatment of covenant actions in English common law digests of the period, where the question of who held standing to sue on a covenant tied to land was a live and contested issue.
No other source dictionary in the available Law Mind corpus provides a direct entry for de conventione. Researchers requiring deeper historical treatment should consult Gale's Terms de la Ley (the early English law dictionary tradition), Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or Bouvier's Law Dictionary (various editions), where covenant actions and their Latin designations receive more extended treatment. The absence of this term from American legal dictionaries of the late nineteenth century beyond a brief cross-reference reflects its status even then as primarily antiquarian vocabulary — useful for reading older instruments and cases, not for active pleading.
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Jurisdictional Note
De conventione as an active form of action was abolished along with the common law forms of action in England by the Common Law Procedure Acts of the mid-nineteenth century and in American jurisdictions by the various Field Code and code pleading reforms of the same era. Its relevance today is historical and interpretive, not procedural.
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