Definition
De son done (Law French: "of his gift" or "of his own gift") is a pleading formula used in historical English common law to assert that the defendant holds or received property by virtue of a gift from the plaintiff or the plaintiff's predecessor. The phrase appears primarily in real property and feoffment actions, where a party acknowledges or relies upon a prior conveyance or gift as the source of a right or possession.
In its procedural context, de son done functioned as an affirmative characterization of the origin of a holding — establishing that whatever estate, possession, or benefit the defendant enjoyed came not by wrong or disseisin but by the voluntary act of the grantor. It belongs to the family of Law French pleading tags that defined the factual posture of a case at the outset of argument or pleading.
Common Confusion
De son done is sometimes loosely conflated with de son tort (of his own wrong), a far more consequential phrase used in executor and administrator law to describe a person who, without legal authority, administers a decedent's estate and thereby becomes liable as an executor de son tort. The two phrases share grammatical structure and Law French origin but operate in entirely different doctrinal contexts. A researcher encountering either phrase in a historical document should confirm which formula is present before proceeding, as the legal consequences differ substantially.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow historical pleading term encountered almost exclusively in Year Book cases, early common law plea rolls, and treatises on real property practice predating the abolition of formal common law pleading. Researchers working in pre-nineteenth-century English legal sources will encounter de son done as a fragment within larger pleading formulas — often paired with other Law French tags — rather than as a standalone doctrine.
The primary research trap is treating de son done as an isolated legal concept when it functioned as a component phrase within a structured pleading. Burrill's entry pairs it implicitly with cognizance pleading (flagged by the cross-reference to "Sur cognizance"), meaning the term's legal weight depended entirely on the procedural posture in which it appeared. A researcher who encounters the phrase should immediately ask: what larger formula surrounds it, and what action type is being pled?
The phrase also appears in variant spellings and abbreviations across historical manuscripts, including "de son don" and contracted forms. Transcription inconsistencies in digitized Year Book materials can cause keyword searches to miss relevant passages. Manual review of surrounding pleading language is advisable when the phrase is suspected but not returned by search.
No direct American case law lineage attaches to this phrase. It did not survive the transition to code pleading and carries no operative modern legal significance. Its research value is historical and interpretive — helping date and characterize documents, and connecting a pleading to the body of English common law doctrine governing gifts, feoffments, and lawful possession.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives a minimal entry: "Of his gift. Of his own" — pairing the phrase with a cross-reference to cognizance pleading and the related tag de son greé ("of his own accord"). This compression is typical of Burrill's treatment of Law French formulas, which he generally renders as translation notes rather than doctrinal explanations.
The brevity of Burrill's entry reflects the term's status by the mid-nineteenth century: a relic of pleading practice that trained lawyers might encounter in old reports but would not use in live litigation. Burrill does not attempt to reconstruct the procedural context in which the phrase operated, leaving the researcher to look upstream to Year Book scholarship and Blackstone's commentaries on real property pleading for substantive guidance.
Historical dictionaries uniformly agree on the translation but offer little doctrinal elaboration. What the sources miss is the relational character of the phrase — its meaning was always relational to a grantor, a specific conveyance, and a pleading context — and that gap is not addressed in any of the standard Law French glossaries.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no operative significance in any current American or Commonwealth jurisdiction. It is relevant only to English common law history and to the interpretation of historical legal documents, Year Book reports, and early treatise literature.