Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "to have given and granted," or, in the first-person active form, "I have given and granted." It served as the operative language in ancient charters of feoffment and deeds of grant by which a grantor formally conveyed land or other property to a grantee. The phrase functioned as the legal engine of the instrument — the words that, when properly inscribed, effected the transfer of seisin or interest. It appears most fully in the traditional formula: dedisse, concessisse, et hac præsenti carta mea indentata confirmasse — "to have given, granted, and by this my present indenture confirmed" — which represented the complete tripartite operative clause of conveyance.
Common Confusion
The phrase is sometimes treated as interchangeable with habendam or tenendum clauses, but those serve distinct functions. Dedisse et concessisse is the operative grant — the act of conveyance itself. The habendum clause (to have and to hold) defines the estate granted. The tenendum clause specifies the tenure. Collapsing these into one another obscures how medieval conveyancers understood the internal architecture of a deed.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is a marker of document age and type. Encountering it in a source signals that the instrument follows the form of a medieval or early modern common law conveyance — almost certainly a feoffment, grant, or indenture of conveyance predating the more flexible drafting conventions that followed the Statute of Uses (1535) and later the Statute of Frauds (1677). Researchers working in English property history, colonial land records, or early American title chains will find this formula in original grants and confirmatory instruments well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in jurisdictions that retained English common law conveyancing forms.
The phrase also matters for reading historical instruments at their word. In medieval and early modern practice, the choice of operative words was not merely stylistic — courts treated different verbs as carrying different legal consequences. Dedi (I give) could suggest a present transfer; concessi (I grant) was associated with incorporeal hereditaments. The combination dedisse et concessisse thus served to cover both corporeal and incorporeal interests in a single stroke, a drafting strategy that reflected hard-won practical experience with judicial parsing of conveyancing language.
Researchers should also be alert to variant forms. The phrase appears in different tenses and persons depending on whether the instrument is drafted in the first person singular, recited in the third person, or quoted in subsequent legal proceedings. The recital form — "that A. de B. had given and granted" — will appear in later confirmation deeds, plea rolls, and title abstracts, where the original operative words are being rehearsed rather than exercised.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most useful entry among the standard historical legal dictionaries, supplying not only the translation but a working example of the full commencement clause in which dedisse et concessisse appears. The model runs: Omnibus Christi fidelibus ad quos præsentes literæ indentatæ pervenerint, A. de B. salutem in Domino sempiternam. Sciatis me dedisse, concessisse, et hac præsenti carta mea indentata confirmasse C. de D. talem terram — "To all the faithful in Christ to whom the present indenture letters shall come, A. of B., everlasting greeting in the Lord. Know that I have given, granted, and by this my present indenture confirmed to C. of D. such land." This example is genuinely instructive because it preserves the full formal architecture: the universal address, the perpetual salutation, the operative triple verb, and the identification of grantor, grantee, and subject matter. It demonstrates that dedisse et concessisse never stood alone in practice — it was embedded in a formulaic structure each element of which had recognized legal significance.
What the historical dictionaries largely omit is any account of how courts treated the phrase when it appeared in isolation or in abbreviated form, and what happened when the tripartite formula was incomplete. Those questions require recourse to the Year Books and to treatises on conveyancing such as Coke upon Littleton.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Feoffment; Conveyancing (Historical); Operative Words of Grant