Definition
An archaic English legal term meaning an escrow — specifically, a deed or written instrument delivered to a neutral third party (a "stranger") to be held until a condition is fulfilled, at which point it becomes operative. The term also carried the secondary meaning of a scroll, reflecting the physical form of early legal instruments. ESCROWL is the older spelling variant of ESCROW and appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal texts and the sources that quote them.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in current general use. ESCROW survives as the modern form and appears in common usage to describe any arrangement where funds or documents are held by a neutral third party pending a transaction.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; subsumed under ESCROW.
The gap here is historical rather than semantic. ESCROWL and ESCROW are the same concept; the distinction is purely orthographic and temporal. Researchers encountering ESCROWL in a source are not reading a different legal doctrine — they are reading an older hand.
Common Confusion
ESCROWL is frequently misread by modern researchers as a variant term with distinct legal content. It is not. It is simply an older anglicized spelling of ESCROW, influenced by the Norman French and Latin scribal traditions that shaped early English legal writing. The two terms are substantively identical. Confusion also arises when researchers encounter ESCROWL used to mean "scroll" rather than "conditional delivery" — context determines which sense is operative, though the two meanings are connected: the escrow document was itself a scroll.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal materials — year books, Perkins's Profitable Book, early conveyancing treatises, and their quotations in 19th-century digests — will encounter ESCROWL where a modern source would say ESCROW. The term does not signal a different doctrine; it signals a different era.
The chief trap is search behavior. A corpus search for ESCROW will not surface documents using ESCROWL, and vice versa. Researchers tracing the historical development of escrow doctrine in Law Mind's historical sources must run both spellings as search terms.
The Perkins citation (Perk. c. 1, § 9; c. 2, §§ 137, 138) appears identically across all three dictionary sources and is the anchor reference for this term in the historical record. John Perkins's A Very Profitable Book (16th century) was a standard conveyancing authority in early English law and is the primary textual home of ESCROWL as a term of art. Any Law Mind corpus materials touching early English conveyancing or deed delivery will potentially use this spelling.
The "delivery to a stranger" language quoted across sources is not incidental. It captures the operative legal feature of escrow: the grantor parts with the instrument to a disinterested third party, removing it from the grantor's control, so that it becomes a true conditional delivery rather than a revocable act. This structural element — the stranger as neutral depositary — connects ESCROWL directly to the modern escrow doctrine's core requirement of third-party custody.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three sources — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill's — are in precise agreement, reproducing the same definition, the same quoted passage, and the same Perkins citation with only minor typographic variation. This uniformity reflects that all three drew from the same narrow body of authority rather than from independent research. None of the historical dictionary entries elaborate on the doctrine of conditional delivery or trace the term's transition into modern ESCROW. They treat ESCROWL as a glossary item — a spelling to be identified and redirected — rather than as a substantive entry. Researchers wanting doctrinal depth on escrow must look to the ESCROW entry in these same sources, not here.
Burrill's preserves the cleanest transcription of the Perkins passage. Black's 2nd edition introduces a minor typographical artifact (the "¢" for "c." in the section reference) without substantive effect.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Escrow; Conveyancing; Conditional Delivery of Deeds.