Definition
A Latin term from old English law denoting a feoffment — the act of conveying a freehold estate in land by livery of seisin, the formal ceremony by which a grantor (the feoffor) transferred possession of real property to a recipient (the feoffee). Feofamentum names both the transaction itself and the instrument recording it. The spelling feoffamentum is the more commonly encountered form in historical sources; the two spellings refer to the same legal act.
Common Confusion
Feofamentum, feoffamentum, and feoffment are functionally the same concept across variant spellings and linguistic registers — feofamentum and feoffamentum are Latin forms; feoffment is the anglicized equivalent. Researchers encountering any of these forms in manuscript sources, plea rolls, or early treatises are looking at the same legal transaction. The variation in spelling is a feature of medieval and early modern Latin orthography, not a distinction in legal meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in Latin legal records — plea rolls, feet of fines, cartularies, and early law treatises from the medieval and early modern English periods. Researchers should expect both spellings (feofamentum and feoffamentum) to appear without consistency even within a single document collection, and search strategies must account for both. The anglicized form feoffment is far more prevalent in secondary sources, digests, and post-medieval legal writing; most substantive legal analysis of the transaction will be found under that heading rather than the Latin.
The term signals a context governed by the feudal land law of medieval England, before the Statute of Uses (1536) and long before modern conveyancing displaced livery of seisin as the operative transfer mechanism. When this term surfaces in a source, the researcher is working in a legal world where physical delivery of possession — the handing over of a clod of earth or twig on the land itself — was the operative legal act, not the execution of a written instrument. This has consequences for how those records describe title and transfer.
Burrill notes the form feofamentum as less common than feoffamentum, which is itself a useful flag: if a particular record uses feofamentum, it may reflect regional scribal convention or an earlier stratum of Latin legal writing. The paleographic context matters.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal source for this entry and treats feofamentum straightforwardly as a Latin variant of feoffamentum, directing the reader to that primary entry for substantive treatment. Burrill cites Spelman's Glossarium for the root verb feofare. Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum remains one of the foundational references for Anglo-Latin legal and feudal terminology, and researchers working on medieval English land records who encounter this term would do well to consult it directly. Burrill offers no independent doctrinal analysis under feofamentum; the entry functions as a cross-reference, which accurately reflects how the term operates in the sources — it is a spelling variant, not a term of art with its own distinct body of doctrine.