Definition
In historical property law, "doing" (from the Latin faciendo or faciendum) was the formal term used in old conveyances to reserve and express services owed by a grantee to a grantor. Where "rendering" (reddendo) designated the payment of rent, "doing" designated the performance of affirmative acts or services — typically personal or feudal obligations attached to the grant of land. The distinction was technical: rent was rendered; services were done.
Outside this conveyancing context, "doing" appears as a general term for any act or course of conduct, particularly in phrases such as "wrongful doing," "doing of an act," and "doing business." The latter usage has developed its own body of law around jurisdictional questions, especially in the context of corporate presence and service of process.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A deed or action, especially when somebody is held responsible for it.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Anything done; a deed; an action good or bad; hence, in the plural, conduct; behavior. "To render an account of his doings." — Barrow.
The common meaning of "doing" is broad and unremarkable — simply the act of performing something. The legal significance is narrower and historically specific: in conveyancing, "doing" was a term of art that carried precise consequences for the nature of the obligation reserved. A researcher encountering "doing" in a medieval or early modern deed should not read it as mere descriptive language but as a technical signal identifying the type of service reserved.
Common Confusion
"Doing" and "rendering" are easily conflated when reading historical conveyances, but they were legally distinct. Rendering (reddendo) expressed a rent obligation — typically a recurring payment. Doing (faciendo) expressed a service obligation — an affirmative act, such as military service, labor, or attendance at court. Misreading one for the other can obscure the actual burden attached to a grant of land.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English property law, feudal tenure, or colonial American land records will encounter "doing" as a term of art in conveyancing instruments. Its appearance signals a service reservation, not merely descriptive language. The distinction between doing and rendering was foundational to understanding the nature of tenure obligations, and historical sources treat it as a bright-line technical category.
In modern legal research, "doing" more often appears in the phrase "doing business," which governs whether a foreign corporation is subject to a state's jurisdiction, service of process rules, or licensing requirements. This modern usage has nothing to do with the feudal conveyancing sense. Researchers moving across time periods must be alert to this shift: the same word carries entirely different freight depending on the era and context of the source.
Historical corpora — particularly early deed books, colonial land grants, and English conveyancing treatises — will use "doing" in the feudal sense. Twentieth-century and later sources will almost invariably use it in the jurisdictional or colloquial sense. There is no overlap in meaning between the two contexts, so corpus searches on "doing" require careful filtering by document type and date.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st ed.), Burrill's Law Dictionary, and Black's Law Dictionary (2nd ed.) are in full agreement on this term: all three define "doing" exclusively in its conveyancing sense, as the formal word expressing reserved services, contrasted with "rendering" for rent. All three cite the same authority — Perkins's Profitable Book of Conveyancing, chapter 10 — with minor variation in section numbers across editions (§§ 625, 635, 638 in the 1st edition; § 685 appears likely a typographical variant in the 2nd edition).
The uniformity across these sources reflects how narrow and settled this usage was in legal drafting. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the modern "doing business" sense, which had not yet emerged as a distinct legal category when these dictionaries were compiled. Researchers relying solely on these sources will find no guidance for the jurisdictional use of the term.
Jurisdictional Note
The conveyancing sense of "doing" is rooted in English common law and appears across American jurisdictions that inherited that tradition. The "doing business" standard, by contrast, varies significantly by state and has been substantially shaped by federal due process doctrine governing personal jurisdiction over corporations.