Definition
The feoffator is the grantor in a feoffment — the party who conveys a fee (a freehold estate in land) to another by the medieval ceremony of livery of seisin. The feoffator transfers both possession and title to the feoffee (feoffatus) through a formal act, traditionally involving physical delivery of a clod of earth or a twig on the land itself, accompanied by words of grant. The term is the Latin form used in old English legal records; its English equivalent is feoffor.
Common Confusion
Feoffator and feoffatus (or feoffee) are mirror-image terms that historical sources treat together and modern researchers sometimes conflate. The feoffator gives the fee; the feoffatus receives it. Burrill's entry for feoffator directly pairs it with feoffatus to prevent exactly this confusion. A related point of confusion: feoffator describes the grantor specifically in a feoffment by livery of seisin, not every grantor of a freehold estate. Later conveyancing methods — bargain and sale, lease and release, covenant to stand seised — involved grantors who were not feoffators in the technical sense.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records, Year Books, and Latin pleadings. Researchers working in pre-Statute of Uses (1536) materials will encounter feoffator in the context of uses and trusts, where a feoffator might enfeoff a group of feoffees to uses — a foundational structure in the history of equity. The feoffator-feoffee relationship was the central mechanism for early use arrangements before the Statute converted most equitable interests into legal estates.
The term essentially disappears from practical legal usage after the Statute of Uses and the later Statute of Frauds (1677), which imposed writing requirements that displaced the livery of seisin ceremony. Researchers should not expect to find feoffator in American legal materials except in historical commentary or comparative property law scholarship.
One navigational trap: variant spellings are common in manuscript sources. Latin records may render the term as feofator, feoffatorem (accusative), or feoffatoris (genitive). Searching a single spelling in archival databases will miss cognate forms. The Bracton citations appearing across all four source dictionaries (Bracton, fols. 12b, 81) point to De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae as the primary jurisprudential source for the term's technical content.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition without meaningful divergence: the feoffator is the one who gives or bestows a fee and makes a feoffment. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's are nearly identical, each citing Bracton. Burrill adds the most value by pairing feoffator with its counterpart feoffatus in adjacent entries, making the relational structure explicit — a useful editorial choice that Black's omits.
No source dictionary attempts to extend the term into equity doctrine, uses, or post-Statute history. This is a genuine gap: the feoffator was not merely a grantor but often the foundational party in use arrangements that gave rise to the trust. Researchers relying solely on these dictionary entries will understand the formal definition but miss the term's significance in the development of equity jurisdiction. Bracton, Fleta (cited by Burrill), and Coke's commentary on Littleton provide the deeper doctrinal context the dictionaries do not.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Feoffment; Livery of Seisin; Statute of Uses; History of Uses and Trusts.