Definition
A feoffatus (Latin; plural: feoffati) is the recipient of a feoffment — that is, the person to whom a fee (a freehold estate in land) was granted by livery of seisin under the old English common law system of land transfer. The feoffatus is the grantee in a feoffment transaction; the counterpart is the feoffor, the grantor. The term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern legal sources and has no operative meaning in modern property law, having been rendered obsolete by the abolition of livery of seisin as a mode of conveyance.
Common Confusion
FEOFFATUS / FEOFFEE: These terms are functionally identical in meaning — both refer to the recipient of a feoffment. Feoffatus is the Latinized form used in formal legal treatises and pleadings, particularly those drawing on Bracton and the civilian tradition. Feoffee is the anglicized form that became standard in later common law practice and legal dictionaries. Researchers encountering feoffatus in a source are seeing the same legal actor as feoffee; the difference is linguistic register, not legal substance.
Why It Matters in Research
The term feoffatus appears almost exclusively in Latin legal texts and early treatises rooted in the Bractonian tradition. Researchers working in Law Mind's corpus of historical English property law will encounter it in manuscript sources, Year Books, and early printed treatises where Latin was still the language of formal legal discourse. After the gradual shift to English in pleadings and legal writing — accelerated by the Pleading in English Act 1362 and later statutory developments — feoffatus gave way almost entirely to feoffee, and a researcher searching one form may miss sources using the other.
The practical trap: corpus searches limited to feoffee will not surface Latin-register sources using feoffatus, and vice versa. Any research into medieval land transfer, seisin, or the fee simple should account for both forms.
The term also signals the analytical framework of its source. A text deploying feoffatus is almost certainly operating within the scholastic common law tradition shaped by Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, not the later Coke-era common law synthesis. The conceptual vocabulary around feoffment, seisin, and the fee differs in meaningful ways between these traditions, and feoffatus is a marker of which tradition a source is working in.
Beyond land transfer, researchers should be alert to feoffatus appearing in trust-adjacent contexts. The feoffee to uses — the precursor to the modern trustee — was a feoffatus holding legal title for the benefit of another, a structure that gave rise to Chancery's jurisdiction over uses and ultimately to the Statute of Uses 1535. Sources discussing this history may use feoffatus in what is functionally a proto-trust context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's are in complete agreement: feoffatus means feoffee, and the definition rests on Bracton's authority (fols. 17b and 44b/44d). All three sources treat this as a term requiring only brief explanation — a simple Latin-to-English equivalence — reflecting its status as a technical relic rather than a working legal concept at the time of their compilation. None of the dictionaries address the uses context or the trust-law implications of the feoffee's role, which reflects the narrowed historical scope of dictionary treatment; researchers should not take that silence to mean the term is unconnected to equity doctrine. Black's 2nd edition gives the folio reference as 44d, while Black's 1st and Bouvier's cite 44b — a minor discrepancy that does not affect the substantive definition but is worth noting for source verification.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Feoffment; Livery of Seisin; Feoffee to Uses