Definition
Fine sur concessit (Law French and Latin: "a fine upon he hath granted") is a historical species of fine — a formal conveyance of land in the Court of Common Pleas — in which the cognizor (the party surrendering or confirming a claim to land) does not acknowledge any pre-existing right in the cognizee, but instead grants a new estate, typically for life or a term of years, as a means of settling a dispute. The grant is made de novo, meaning from scratch, by way of a supposed composition or compromise.
Unlike the fine sur cognizance de droit come ceo que il tient de son done — where the cognizor fully acknowledges the cognizee's prior right — the fine sur concessit involves no such admission. The cognizor concedes nothing about the past; he simply grants going forward. The result is a limited estate rather than a fee simple, and the conveyance carries the bar and finality that attached to all fines as a matter of common law procedure.
Common Confusion
Three principal species of fine are frequently conflated in historical sources. The fine sur cognizance de droit come ceo que il tient de son done acknowledged a full pre-existing right and was the strongest form, suitable to convey a fee simple. The fine sur cognizance de droit tant solement acknowledged a right, but without the additional clause of gift, and was used in particular circumstances involving releases. The fine sur concessit is the weakest of the trio: it acknowledges nothing about prior ownership and conveys only a limited new estate. A researcher encountering any of these in historical records should not assume equivalence; the form used determines the estate conveyed and the scope of the resulting bar against future claims.
Why It Matters in Research
The fine sur concessit appears almost exclusively in English common law sources predating the abolition of fines and recoveries by the Fines and Recoveries Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV, c. 74). After that statute, the practical machinery of fines was swept away, and the term dropped out of active legal use. Researchers working in English property records, chancery filings, or plea rolls from the medieval period through the early nineteenth century will encounter this form; those working in American materials will find it only in treatises and digests that transmitted English common law doctrine, rarely if ever in actual American court proceedings.
The key research trap is misreading the scope of a fine sur concessit as equivalent to a full conveyance in fee. Because the cognizor acknowledges no precedent right, the estate granted is typically life or years — not fee simple. A title chain relying on a fine sur concessit is therefore far weaker than one resting on a fine sur cognizance de droit, and a researcher reconstructing historical title must treat the two as fundamentally different instruments.
Additionally, the word "fine" in this compound term carries its archaic legal meaning — a formal final concord in a real action — entirely distinct from the modern sense of a monetary penalty. Indexing and full-text search across historical corpora will surface both usages indiscriminately, and the researcher must disambiguate by context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Burrill's, and Bouvier's are in precise agreement on the substance of this entry, and all three trace to the same foundational sources: Blackstone's Commentaries, Book II, Chapter 21, and Stephen's Commentaries, Volume I. This alignment is unsurprising — the term had a fixed, technical meaning with no contested interpretive dimension by the time any of these dictionaries was compiled.
Burrill adds the Law French and Latin language tag explicitly, which is useful for a researcher tracking terminology across multilingual historical records. Bouvier references Sheppard's Touchstone alongside Blackstone, which is worth noting: Sheppard's Touchstone of Common Assurances provides more granular treatment of the forms and effects of fines than the Commentaries alone, and researchers needing operational detail on how these instruments were drafted and what estates they conveyed should consult Sheppard directly.
None of the three dictionary sources addresses the procedural context — the levy of a fine as a fictitious action — in any depth under this entry, nor do they discuss the distinctions among species of fine in comparative terms. Researchers should not rely on these entries alone to understand the full framework.
Jurisdictional Note
The fine sur concessit is purely an English common law instrument. It has no independent existence in American law, though American treatise writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reproduced and explained it as part of the received common law inheritance. Post-1833 English practice and all American jurisdictions rendered the form obsolete.