Definition
In Law French legal usage, FEAT means a deed or legal act — an executed, formalized act having legal consequence. It is the anglicized rendering of the Law French and Anglo-Norman "fait," used in early common law texts to denote a deed in the broad sense: any solemn act done by a party, particularly a written instrument under seal. The term appears in historical legal sources principally as a variant spelling or phonetic transliteration of FAIT, and carries the same meaning. It has no independent technical significance in modern legal usage.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A relatively rare or difficult accomplishment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An act; a deed; an exploit — particularly a striking act of strength, skill, or cunning; a trick.
The gap here is instructive. In ordinary English, ancient and modern, "feat" emphasizes difficulty or impressiveness — something done well or against odds. In the Law French legal tradition, FEAT carried no such evaluative weight. It meant simply a deed: an act done, formalized and binding. A mundane conveyance was as much a "feat" as any dramatic legal maneuver. Researchers encountering the word in historical legal materials should resist the ordinary connotation of achievement or skill.
Common Confusion
FEAT and FAIT are functionally interchangeable in the sources where FEAT appears, and Burrill explicitly redirects the reader to FAIT. The confusion is purely orthographic and historical: early legal scribes and compilers rendered the Law French "fait" in various anglicized forms, of which "feat" is one. In no modern legal context does FEAT carry independent meaning distinct from FAIT. Researchers should treat any instance of "feat" in a historical legal document as a probable variant of "fait" and consult that entry for full analysis.
Why It Matters in Research
FEAT is a low-frequency variant that surfaces in early common law manuscripts, digests, and compilations where Law French vocabulary was being rendered into approximate English spelling. Its primary research value is navigational: encountering it in a historical source, a researcher should immediately cross-reference FAIT to access the full doctrinal context — deed, act under seal, executed instrument.
The term is unlikely to appear in post-eighteenth-century legal materials with any technical meaning. If it appears in a modern document, it almost certainly carries only its ordinary English sense (an accomplishment) and has no legal-technical weight. The danger runs in the opposite direction when working backward through older sources: assuming the word is merely ordinary English when the context is legal and the meaning is "deed."
Law French orthography was inconsistent across scribes, centuries, and regional legal cultures. FEAT, FAIT, FAICT, and FEIT all appear as variants in the historical record. Any corpus search relying on a single spelling will miss cognate instances. Researchers working in early Year Books, plea rolls, or abridgments should build search strategies that account for this orthographic range.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dedicated historical legal dictionary entry for this term and treats it as a near-pure cross-reference: "L. Fr. Done; a deed. Kelham. See Fait." The reference to Kelham points to Robert Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), one of the standard reference works for Law French vocabulary used by common law lexicographers of Burrill's era. Burrill adds nothing beyond the redirect, which is itself informative — the term warranted entry only to prevent researcher confusion, not because it carried independent doctrinal content.
No other historical dictionary in the standard shelf (Bouvier, Black, Jacob, Tomlin, Cowell) appears to have carried a separate entry for FEAT in its legal sense, likely because the Law French usage was sufficiently archaic even by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that compilers treated FAIT as the canonical form. This silence confirms that FEAT is a peripheral variant rather than a term with its own doctrinal history.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See FAIT (Law Mind Legal Encyclopedia) for the full treatment of the deed concept in its Law French and common law context.