Definition
A fine sur conusance de droit come ceo que il ad de son done is one of the historic forms of a fine as a conveyance in English real property law. It translates roughly as "a fine upon acknowledgment of right as that which he has of his gift." In this variety of fine, the conusor (the party surrendering the estate) acknowledged in the court record that the right to the land belonged to the conusee (the party receiving it), not merely as something newly granted, but as something already held by the conusee by virtue of the conusor's own prior gift. This acknowledgment gave the conusee a fee simple of the strongest available quality — a title resting on droit tantum, meaning right only, without the need to allege or simulate a prior tortious dispossession. The effect was to vest in the conusee an estate of inheritance, grounded in the fiction of judicial recognition of an existing right rather than in a new conveyance.
This form stood in contrast to three other principal varieties of the fine:
- Fine sur concessit: the conusor granted a new estate rather than acknowledging an existing right.
- Fine sur release: the conusor released whatever right remained after a prior conveyance.
- Fine sur done, grant, et render: a compound fine combining a gift and a regrant, used for creating remainders and reversions.
The fine sur conusance de droit come ceo que il ad de son done was considered the most absolute form because the acknowledgment of preexisting right left the conusee's title with the fewest points of vulnerability to future challenge.
Common Confusion
The four principal forms of fines are routinely collapsed or conflated in secondary literature and older indexes. Researchers must take care to distinguish fine sur conusance de droit come ceo que il ad de son done (acknowledgment of an already-held right, appropriate for conveying fee simple) from fine sur concessit (grant of a new estate, used for terms of years or life estates). Rapalje & Lawrence treats these under the same parent entry for FINE but with separate subsection numbers; catalog and digest indexers did not always preserve those distinctions. The phrase "droit tantum" appears in both contexts with slightly different technical force, adding a further layer of potential confusion.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-1834 English sources and in American materials commenting on or reproducing English real property doctrine. The Fines and Recoveries Act 1833 abolished fines as a mode of conveyance in England, and American jurisdictions had largely displaced or formally abolished them by the mid-nineteenth century. By the time the major American legal dictionaries were compiled, the term had passed into purely historical usage.
Researchers working in colonial land records, early American deed registries, or English chancery and common pleas records before 1833 will encounter references to fines in conveyancing instruments. The specific form matters because it determines what estate was conveyed and by what legal theory the title was held. A deed abstract or title opinion that identifies only "a fine" without specifying the form may be incomplete for purposes of tracing the chain of title.
In Law Mind corpus searches, this term will surface in treatises on real property, conveyancing manuals, and digests of English real property law. It will rarely appear as a standalone entry; most sources subsection it under the parent heading FINE. Cross-referencing the parent entry and its numbered subdivisions is essential to recovering the full analytical framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence treats this form under the parent entry FINE with numbered subsections, placing fine sur conusance de droit come ceo que il ad de son done at section 12 and fine sur concessit at section 14. The entry is terse by necessity, assuming reader familiarity with the broader common law framework of fines and recoveries. The Latin-French terminology is presented without translation, which is characteristic of late-nineteenth-century American law dictionaries dealing with obsolete conveyancing doctrine.
Rapalje & Lawrence's treatment is consistent with the classical exposition found in Blackstone's Commentaries (Book II, Chapter 21) and in Cruise's Digest of the Laws of England Respecting Real Property, both of which are the standard background sources for this subject. Those treatises provide the fuller doctrinal account that Rapalje & Lawrence presupposes. Researchers who encounter only the dictionary entry should move immediately to Blackstone or Cruise for the substantive explanation of why the acknowledgment of droit tantum gave this form its particular title-securing force.
No major American legal dictionary of the period — not Black's, not Bouvier — contains this phrase as a standalone entry. It is treated as a subcategory of FINE throughout the historical literature, which means search strategies relying on the full phrase as an index heading will frequently fail.
Jurisdictional Note
This form of fine was a creature of English common law and had no parallel statutory development in American jurisdictions. Where American courts or conveyancers referenced it, they did so by way of received English doctrine. Its practical significance in American law ended early; most American states either never recognized fines as a mode of conveyance or abolished them in the first decades of the nineteenth century.