Definition
Feodal actions are real actions — that is, common law civil actions brought to recover land or an estate in land, or to enforce rights directly connected to freehold tenure. The term is an archaic designation found in the old English law books, used to describe real actions collectively on the ground that they originated in and were shaped by the feudal system of land tenure (feoda, meaning fees or feudal estates). In substance, feodal actions and real actions are the same category; the label simply emphasizes the feudal origin of the procedural and substantive rules governing them.
Common Confusion
FEODAL ACTIONS vs. PERSONAL ACTIONS vs. MIXED ACTIONS: Medieval and early modern common law divided civil actions into three categories — real, personal, and mixed. Feodal actions are real actions and must not be confused with personal actions (which seek money damages or the recovery of personal property) or mixed actions (which combine a claim to land with a claim for damages, such as waste). The feodal/real distinction matters because real actions carried unique procedural features — voucher to warranty, the grand cape and petit cape, trial by battle in some early forms — that personal actions never had. Researchers who encounter a pleading described simply as an "action" must determine which category applies before interpreting procedure or outcome.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
The old books organized real (feodal) actions into several named writs, the principal ones being:
- Writ of right — the highest and most comprehensive real action, lying to recover the fee simple itself.
- Writ of entry — an action challenging a defective title based on a specific unlawful entry or disseisin; procedurally simpler than the writ of right.
- Writ of formedon — used by claimants in tail to recover entailed land; subdivided into formedon in the descender, in the remainder, and in the reverter.
- Assize of novel disseisin — a possessory real action for recent dispossession; faster and more practical than the writ of right.
- Assize of mort d'ancestor — a possessory action to recover land of which one's ancestor died seised.
These are not sub-definitions of feodal actions as a concept but rather the specific procedural vehicles that fell within the category.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears almost exclusively in historical sources and is not operative modern law. Its research significance is therefore navigational and contextual.
First, the label feodal actions signals that a source is discussing pre-modern English real property procedure. If you encounter the phrase in a treatise, pleading form, or abridgment, you are almost certainly working in pre-nineteenth-century English law or in early American jurisdictions that carried English forms forward before statutory abolition.
Second, real actions (feodal actions) were largely abolished in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and tidied away by subsequent legislation. American jurisdictions abolished them piecemeal through the nineteenth century, replacing them with ejectment and later with unified civil procedure. A researcher working in American sources after roughly 1850 will rarely see the category invoked in a live proceeding; when it does appear, it is usually in a historical argument about title chains reaching back to colonial grants.
Third, the identification of an action as feodal/real had direct consequences for jurisdiction, pleading requirements, the availability of voucher to warranty, and the nature of judgment — consequences that disappear once you misclassify the action. Corpus searches on land dispute records from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will be poorly interpreted without this categorical framework.
Fourth, be alert to source inconsistency: some older American digests and abridgments use feodal actions and real actions interchangeably without explanation, while others treat feodal actions as a slightly narrower subset. In practice, the two terms can be treated as synonymous for research purposes, but the distinction is worth noting when a source appears to be drawing a line between them.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources agree on the core equivalence: feodal actions are real actions, so called because they relate to feoda — fees or estates in land. Black's and Burrill's both cite Mirr. c. 2, § 6 (the Mirror of Justices) and Blackstone's Commentaries 3:117 as authority; Bouvier cites the same Blackstone passage. The uniformity across sources reflects that this is a settled descriptive label rather than a contested doctrinal term — no source disputes or elaborates the definition.
Burrill's entry is slightly more expansive in that it clusters adjacent terms (feodality, feodary) in the same article, which is useful context: feodality means fealty or fidelity owed under feudal tenure, and the feodary was an officer of the court of wards connected to feudal incidents. This clustering underscores that feodal actions belongs to a family of feudal-tenure vocabulary that permeates the same stratum of sources.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is a working account of procedure — they assume the reader already knows what real actions entail. Researchers unfamiliar with the mechanics of the writ of right, voucher to warranty, or the possessory/droitural distinction should supplement these dictionary entries with Blackstone's Commentaries Book III or Glanvill before working with primary records in this area.
Jurisdictional Note
Feodal actions as a living procedural category survived longer in some American states than in England due to uneven reception of English procedural reforms. A handful of states retained real action forms well into the second half of the nineteenth century. Researchers working in colonial or early republic records should verify whether the jurisdiction in question had formally abolished real actions before treating ejectment as the exclusive land recovery vehicle.