Definition
An archaic Anglo-French term meaning "doing" or "in the act of doing." Fesaunt appears in old English deeds and legal instruments as an emphatic word used to describe an act in progress or a party actively performing some act at a relevant moment. It derives from the Old French faire (to do) and belongs to the Law French vocabulary that permeated early English legal drafting.
The term is encountered most often in the formulaic language of medieval conveyancing and pleading, where precision about the timing and character of an act — whether something was completed, continuing, or merely contemplated — carried legal weight.
Why It Matters in Research
Fesaunt is the kind of term that stops a researcher cold when encountered in a transcribed medieval deed or early common law pleading. Its significance is almost entirely contextual: the word does not carry doctrinal freight of its own but signals that the drafter was emphasizing the ongoing or active nature of an act at a specific moment. Researchers working with pre-modern conveyances, records of real property transactions, or early pleading rolls should note it as a marker of temporal emphasis rather than a term with independent legal consequence.
Because fesaunt is Law French rather than Latin or modern English, it will not appear in common-law treatises of later periods and is unlikely to surface outside of materials predating the gradual displacement of Law French from English legal drafting — a process largely complete by the late seventeenth century. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should treat an encounter with fesaunt as a dating signal: its presence strongly suggests a document of medieval or early modern origin, likely pre-1650.
The term may appear in close proximity to related Law French participial constructions. Readers working from manuscript sources or early printed transcriptions should be alert to variant spellings, as Law French orthography was inconsistent across scribal hands and regional traditions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among the shelf sources, defining fesaunt tersely as "doing" and citing Britton, chapter 39, as authority. Britton is a late thirteenth-century treatise on English law, composed in Law French and attributed to the reign of Edward I — confirming that fesaunt belongs to the earliest stratum of the English legal vocabulary.
Burrill's description of fesaunt as "an emphatic word" is the key interpretive note. It signals that the term was not merely descriptive but served a deliberate rhetorical and legal function in drafting: stressing the active, present character of an act. No other shelf source covers this term, and no significant divergence or evolution of meaning is documented. Given the term's obsolescence, the absence of later authority is expected rather than a gap in the record.