Definition
A Latin term meaning "I have demised or leased." Demisi is a first-person perfect indicative verb drawn from medieval Latin conveyancing practice, used as one of the operative words in the formal granting clause of a lease. The full traditional phrase — demisi, concessi, et ad firmam tradidi — translates as "have demised, granted, and to farm let," and constituted the standard words of leasehold conveyance in ancient English lease instruments. The appearance of demisi in a lease carried legal consequences beyond its literal meaning: by operation of law, the word implied a covenant on the part of the lessor that, at the time of delivery of the lease, the lessor had good title and the right to grant the tenancy.
Common Language
This section is omitted. Demisi is pure Latin legal terminology with no common English counterpart. It has no ordinary modern usage outside legal and historical documents.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-modern lease instruments, conveyancing records, or early English real property law will encounter demisi as a term of art in granting clauses. Its significance is primarily historical and interpretive: understanding that demisi, concessi, et ad firmam tradidi was a formulaic triad — not a series of independent operative grants — helps researchers read ancient leases correctly. The three words functioned together as a single conveyancing formula, and no independent legal significance attached to each individually beyond their collective effect in passing a leasehold interest.
The implied covenant dimension is particularly important. Burrill notes that from the word demisi in a lease, the law implied a covenant by the lessor as to title at the time of delivery. This is not merely a linguistic artifact: it affected the rights and remedies available to lessees in early common law, and it distinguishes demisi from a simple acknowledgment of transfer. Researchers examining historical lease disputes or early landlord-tenant litigation should be alert to whether this implied covenant argument was raised.
Modern lease instruments replaced demisi and its companion words with their English equivalents — "have demised, granted, and to farm let" — and that English phrasing in turn gave way to simpler modern language. The term therefore appears almost exclusively in historical sources, early case law, and legal history scholarship. Its presence in a document is a reliable marker of significant age.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on the meaning and function of demisi. All three sources cite Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Comm. 317, 318) as the authoritative reference, locating the term squarely within Blackstone's treatment of leasehold estates and conveyancing formalities. This convergence on a single primary source reflects the term's settled and narrow historical meaning — there is no dispute in the dictionary literature about what demisi meant or how it operated.
Burrill adds the substantively important detail about the implied covenant arising from the use of demisi, which Black's (1st Ed.) omits and Black's (2nd Ed.) addresses only indirectly through case citations. The second edition of Black's supplements the definition with case references — Koch v. Hustis and Kinney v. Watts — showing American courts engaging with the term in lease interpretation disputes well into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is a useful signal that demisi was not merely a curiosity of English legal history but appeared in American conveyancing instruments long enough to generate domestic case law.
None of the historical dictionaries address the term's decline or its displacement by English equivalents, which a researcher must piece together from conveyancing history sources independently.
Jurisdictional Note
Demisi as a live operative term in lease drafting effectively disappeared from American practice with the abandonment of Latin conveyancing formulas, a process largely complete by the mid-nineteenth century. Its appearance in American case law (New York and Wisconsin, among others) reflects carryover from earlier instruments rather than continued use of the Latin form in new drafting.