Definition
A Law French term meaning a gift. In medieval English legal practice, "doun" (also written "don" and "done") referred to a gift or grant, typically in the context of conveyance or transfer of property. The term appears in formal legal texts of the Norman period and survives chiefly as a term of historical legal scholarship rather than active legal practice.
Common Confusion
"Done" as a spelling variant of "doun" should not be confused with the Modern English past participle "done," nor with the legal term "donee" (the recipient of a gift). In Law French legal texts, "done" is the gift itself; in modern legal usage, "donee" is the person who receives it. The visual similarity to common English words creates a genuine risk of misreading when transcribing or indexing manuscript sources.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval English legal sources — particularly Norman-era treatises and Year Books — will encounter "doun," "don," and "done" used interchangeably as variant spellings of the same concept. The lack of standardized spelling in Law French means that searches limited to a single spelling will miss cognate forms. The most significant corpus reference point is Britton, an Anglo-Norman legal treatise from the late thirteenth century, whose thirty-fourth chapter is titled "De Douns" — a chapter devoted to the law of gifts. Researchers consulting Britton directly should locate this chapter when tracing the early doctrine of gratuitous transfers, as it predates much of the common law framework on gifts that later developed in equity. Cross-referencing "don" and "done" in any indexed historical legal corpus is essential, as individual editors and copyists applied no uniform standard. There is no meaningful jurisdictional variation for this term because it belongs entirely to the historical stratum of English law and does not survive in operative modern doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's — are in complete agreement on definition, variant spellings, and the citation to Britton's thirty-fourth chapter. The uniformity across sources reflects how little dispute surrounds this term: it is a straightforward Law French lexical entry with no doctrinal controversy attached. None of the source dictionaries elaborates on the substance of the gift doctrine developed under this heading in Britton, which is a gap for the researcher who wants to move beyond terminology into doctrine. For that purpose, consulting Britton directly — or Pollock and Maitland's The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I — will provide the substantive legal framework that the dictionary entries do not supply.