Definition
A fait enrollé (from Law French, "enrolled deed") is a deed that has been formally recorded in an official court roll or register, as required by law for the conveyance of certain interests in freehold land. The term is most closely associated with the bargain and sale of freeholds under the Statute of Enrollments (1536), which required such conveyances to be enrolled — that is, officially entered on the rolls of one of the courts of record at Westminster or recorded with the clerk of the peace for the county — to be effective at law. Enrollment served as the mechanism by which a purely equitable interest created by a bargain and sale was converted into a legal estate.
Common Confusion
FAIT ENROLLE is sometimes loosely grouped with deeds of feoffment or other common law conveyances, but the distinction matters. A feoffment transferred a freehold by livery of seisin — a physical, ceremonial act on the land itself — and required no enrollment. A bargain and sale, by contrast, arose in equity and conveyed no legal title until the Statute of Enrollments imposed the enrollment requirement. A fait enrollé is therefore not simply any enrolled document; it refers specifically to the class of deeds for which enrollment was a statutory prerequisite to legal effect. Researchers conflating these forms risk misreading whether a conveyance in historical records was legally operative.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with English real property law of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries and will surface in older chancery records, conveyancing treatises, and pleadings involving title disputes. Several research traps apply.
First, the term presupposes familiarity with the Statute of Enrollments (27 Hen. 8, c. 16), the companion statute to the Statute of Uses (27 Hen. 8, c. 10). Neither statute is explicitly named in the dictionary entries, yet neither can be understood without the other. A researcher encountering fait enrollé in a historical document without this statutory context will misread the significance of the enrollment entirely.
Second, enrollment had a strict geographic and procedural meaning. County enrollment and enrollment at Westminster were not equivalent in all circumstances, and the sufficiency of a particular enrollment was a recurring point of litigation. Sources that refer casually to a deed being "enrolled" may not clarify which roll or which court, which can matter for chain-of-title research.
Third, the practical use of the bargain-and-sale-with-enrollment was largely superseded in English practice by the lease-and-release, precisely because the lease-and-release avoided the enrollment requirement while achieving the same conveyancing result. Understanding fait enrollé thus requires understanding why conveyancers were trying to work around it. By the time of the Real Property Act 1845 and subsequent English reforms, enrollment requirements for ordinary freehold conveyances were abolished, making the term functionally obsolete in modern practice.
Fourth, American colonial and early state land records may contain enrolled deeds styled in this fashion, particularly in jurisdictions that adopted English conveyancing practice wholesale before developing their own recording statutes. The term may appear in early deeds from mid-Atlantic colonies in particular.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — both editions of Black's and Bouvier's — offer nearly identical one-line definitions: a deed enrolled, as a bargain and sale of freeholds, with a citation to 1 Keble 568. The agreement is complete and the definitions are accurate as far as they go. The citation to Keble's Reports (a collection of King's Bench decisions from the 1660s–70s) anchors the term in Restoration-era common law litigation, which is useful for dating when the term was active in pleading.
What all three entries omit is the statutory architecture that gave fait enrollé its meaning. None mentions the Statute of Enrollments, the Statute of Uses, or the lease-and-release workaround. For a researcher using these dictionaries as primary navigation tools, the definition answers the question "what is it?" but not "why does it matter?" or "what made it necessary?" Bouvier adds only the note "R. & L. Dict." (Robinson and Lofft's legal dictionary), suggesting reliance on earlier authorities rather than independent analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
As a term of English real property law, fait enrollé has no continuing force in modern American or English law. Its relevance is confined to historical title research in jurisdictions that inherited English conveyancing forms, particularly before the adoption of local recording acts. Scottish law and civil law jurisdictions had separate deed registration systems and would not use this term.