Definition
Latin form of FEOFFMENT. A feoffamentum was the formal conveyance of a freehold estate in land by livery of seisin — the symbolic, physical act of transferring possession — accompanied or followed by a written charter (charta de feoffamento). The term appears throughout medieval English legal records, treatises, and pleadings as the Latin designation for what English practice called a feoffment.
A subsidiary distinction preserved in Bracton and Fleta separates the charta de puro feoffamento — a charter of pure or simple feoffment, without conditions or additions — from feoffments made subject to uses, conditions, or other qualifications. The pure feoffment conveyed the fee absolutely.
Common Confusion
FEOFFAMENTUM / FEOFFMENT / ENFEOFFMENT: These three terms denote the same transaction at different levels of abstraction. Feoffamentum is the Latin record form. Feoffment is its direct English equivalent. Enfeoffment refers to the act or process of making such a conveyance, or to the state of having been so invested. Researchers encountering Latin plea rolls, cartularies, or treatises will find feoffamentum; common law texts and Year Books shift to feoffment; modern historical writing uses enfeoffment. The terms are interchangeable in substance but not in source context.
FEOFFEE TO USES: A related but distinct figure. Before the Statute of Uses (1536), a feoffee to uses held legal seisin of land while beneficial ownership — the use — rested in the cestui que use. The feoffamentum created the feoffee's legal estate; the use was a separate equitable overlay. The Statute of Uses collapsed the distinction in most cases by executing the use and vesting legal title in the beneficiary, effectively abolishing the feoffee to uses as a functioning role.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records will encounter feoffamentum far more often than feoffment. Latin was the language of the common law courts through most of the medieval period, and plea rolls, final concords, and royal writs render the transaction in its Latin form. When sources shift to English — particularly after the Pleading in English Act of 1362 and more decisively after the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act of 1731 — the Latin form recedes from practice records but persists in treatise literature.
Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae is the primary doctrinal source for feoffamentum, and Burrill's citation to folios 12b and 17b points researchers directly to the relevant passages. Fleta, the late-thirteenth-century treatise closely derived from Bracton, repeats and elaborates the doctrine. Researchers using Law Mind's historical sources should trace feoffamentum through Bracton and Fleta first, then follow the concept into Coke on Littleton and Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Comm. 310, the citation consistent across all five source dictionaries here) for its common law development.
The abolition of livery of seisin by the Statute of Frauds (1677) and its practical displacement by the deed poll effectively ended feoffmentum as a living conveyancing mechanism. After 1677, feoffamentum appears only in historical exposition and in the interpretation of older instruments. Researchers reading conveyancing treatises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will find the term treated as archaic even then.
The feoffee-to-uses construction, which grew out of feoffamentum practice, is the bridge concept connecting medieval land law to the modern law of trusts. That connection makes feoffamentum relevant not only to conveyancing history but to equity and trust scholarship.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries converge on a single, spare definition: feoffamentum equals feoffment, with 2 Bl. Comm. 310 as the universal citation. This uniformity signals that by the nineteenth century, the term had passed entirely into historical reference — no doctrinal dispute remained to elaborate.
Burrill adds the most context, preserving the Bracton citation and the distinction between pure and qualified feoffments. The maxim Charta de puro feoffamento est de simplici feoffamento, sine aliqua adjectione (a charter of pure feoffment is a charter of simple feoffment, without any addition) from Bracton fol. 33b and Fleta lib. 3, c. 14 §1 is the only substantive doctrinal gloss any of the dictionaries contribute.
Rapalje & Lawrence is notable for bundling feoffamentum, feoffare, feoffee, and feoffee to uses into a single conceptual cluster, which reflects sound research practice: these terms travel together in the sources and should be researched together.
What the historical dictionaries do not address — because they treat the term as a simple Latin cross-reference — is the procedural mechanics of livery of seisin or the jurisdictional reach of feoffament doctrine in colonial American land practice, where it had some residual presence before being displaced by statutory recording systems.
Jurisdictional Note
Feoffamentum is English in origin and belongs almost entirely to the English common law tradition. American colonial land practice adopted feoffment forms in some jurisdictions, but statutory recording acts and deed requirements displaced them early. Scottish, Irish, and continental legal systems used analogous but formally distinct conveyancing mechanisms. Researchers should not assume direct equivalence when working in non-English source material.