Definition
The recipient of a feoffment — the person to whom a fee (freehold estate in land) was conveyed by the feudal ceremony of livery of seisin. The feoffee received actual possession of the land, with the feoffor (the grantor) being the counterpart who made the conveyance. The term is operative in the law of real property as it existed under the common law of England and the early American colonies, and it persists in historical documents, title chains, and treatises on the law of real property.
FEOFFEE TO USES: A distinct and historically important application. Before the Statute of Uses (1535), land was frequently conveyed to a feoffee not for the feoffee's own benefit but for the use of a third party — the cestui que use. The feoffee to uses held legal title while the cestui que use held the equitable or beneficial interest. This arrangement was the primary vehicle for early trust-like relationships in English law and was the direct precursor to the modern trust.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A vassal holding a fief.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The person to whom a feoffment is made; the person enfeoffed.
The ordinary language definitions are essentially accurate but incomplete for legal research purposes. The casual usage conflates feoffee with "vassal" in a feudal political sense, obscuring the technical legal meaning: the feoffee was the recipient of a specific conveyancing transaction. More significantly, neither common definition captures the critical feoffee to uses application, which is where the term does the most work in legal history and equity jurisprudence.
Common Confusion
FEOFFEE / FEOFFOR: The feoffor grants; the feoffee receives. In historical documents the terms appear in proximity and are sometimes misread. Remember: the -or suffix marks the actor, the -ee suffix marks the recipient — consistent with standard legal English (lessor/lessee, grantor/grantee).
FEOFFEE TO USES / TRUSTEE: The feoffee to uses is the direct ancestor of the modern trustee, but the two are not identical. The feoffee to uses held legal title under the old common law of feoffment. The Statute of Uses (1535) executed many uses, converting equitable interests into legal ones and largely eliminating the feoffee to uses as a functional category. Where uses survived or were re-created (the "use upon a use"), the beneficiary's interest eventually became enforceable in equity as the modern trust. Researchers encountering "feoffee to uses" in pre-1535 materials are looking at a distinct legal mechanism, not simply an archaic synonym for trustee.
Why It Matters in Research
This is primarily a historical term. Researchers will encounter it in: (1) medieval and early modern English land law; (2) American colonial-era conveyances and title abstracts predating the widespread adoption of deed-based transfer; (3) equity jurisprudence tracing the origins of the trust; and (4) treatises — particularly Littleton's Tenures and Blackstone's Commentaries — that anchor Anglo-American property law doctrine.
The feoffee to uses strand is where the term generates the most downstream research. Understanding that relationship requires tracing the Statute of Uses, the courts of equity's response to it, and the emergence of the express trust. Materials written after the Statute of Uses often use "feoffee to uses" loosely or historically — do not assume the writer is describing a live legal arrangement unless the context is clearly pre-1535 English law or a jurisdiction that did not adopt the Statute of Uses.
American researchers should note that the Statute of Uses was received into American law unevenly. Some states expressly adopted it; others rejected it; still others developed independent trust doctrine without relying on it. A title chain or equity case invoking "feoffee to uses" in an American jurisdiction requires attention to whether that jurisdiction received the Statute and what effect that had locally.
Corpus researchers should also be alert to variant spellings in older documents: feffe, feoffatus, and enfeoffed (the verb form) all appear in sources catalogued under different headwords.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's state the definition identically — "he to whom a fee is conveyed" — and all cite Littleton § 1 and Blackstone's Commentaries 2:20 as authority. This convergence reflects the term's relatively settled meaning: it was never contested doctrine, only a label for one party to a conveyancing transaction.
Burrill adds the Anglo-French and Latin forms (feffe, feoffatus), which is useful for researchers working in medieval records or Year Books where the Latin and Law French variants appear.
The most substantive addition in the historical sources is Black's 2nd Ed., which breaks out "feoffee to uses" as a distinct subentry and introduces the cestui que use — the third party for whose benefit the use was held. This is the entry point for the entire law of uses and the history of equity, and its placement as a mere sub-definition understates its historical importance. Researchers should treat it as a gateway term requiring its own research thread, not a footnote.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the Statute of Uses, its effect on feoffees to uses, and the transition to modern trust doctrine. For that, the dictionaries must be supplemented with treatises and encyclopedia sources.
Jurisdictional Note
The feoffee as a live legal category belongs to English common law prior to modern statutory conveyancing reform. In American law, the term survives almost exclusively in historical materials, title chains, and equity scholarship. The practical effect of the Statute of Uses on feoffees to uses varied by state depending on each jurisdiction's reception of English statutes.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Feoffment (for the conveyancing transaction of which the feoffee is the recipient); Uses and the Statute of Uses (for the feoffee to uses, cestui que use, and the development of trust doctrine).