Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "grant." Graunte is the Law French form of the modern legal concept of a grant — a formal conveyance or transfer of property, rights, or interests from one party to another, typically by deed or other instrument. The term appears in early English legal texts and records where Law French was the operative language of pleading, conveyancing, and judicial proceedings. In substance, graunte carries the same meaning as the modern term grant: a voluntary transfer of something (land, a privilege, an office, a franchise) from a grantor to a grantee.
Note: Burrill's entry for GRAUNTE also runs immediately into a separate term, GRAVA (or Grova), a Latin term from old English law meaning a grove, small wood, coppice, or thicket. These are distinct terms sharing a dictionary entry by alphabetical proximity, not by legal relation.
Common Confusion
Graunte and Grava are treated as a single compound entry in Burrill, which can mislead a researcher scanning quickly. They are unrelated. Graunte is Law French for "grant" (a conveyance concept). Grava is Law Latin for a small wood or grove (a land description concept). Any source citing "graunte/grava" in the same passage is almost certainly addressing two different legal matters in sequence, not a single compound term.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering graunte in medieval or early modern English legal documents — plea rolls, feoffment records, conveyances, year book entries — should treat it as the functional equivalent of the modern term GRANT and follow all the research threads that attach to that term: the nature of the thing conveyed, the words of granting, whether the conveyance was of a freehold or lesser interest, and whether livery of seisin was required to complete it.
The term is a marker of period and register. Its appearance signals a document written in or closely following the Law French tradition, which persisted in English legal practice from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. After Law French was formally abolished in English courts by statute in the mid-seventeenth century, graunte disappears from operative legal instruments and is replaced by grant in English. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should therefore expect graunte to appear in older documentary sources — year books, early treatises, records of the common law courts, and conveyancing forms — rather than in modern materials.
One navigational trap: Law French spelling was never fully standardized. Variant spellings (graunt, graunte, grante) may appear in the same document or across documents of the same period without any change in legal meaning. Searches limited to a single spelling may miss relevant occurrences.
The Burrill entry references Britton (Britt. c. 30), a thirteenth-century legal treatise written in Law French, which is itself a primary source for understanding the early English law of grants and conveyances. Researchers tracing the legal meaning of graunte back to its source will find Britton essential.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal — a single line identifying graunte as the Law French equivalent of "grant" and citing Britton. This brevity reflects the nature of the term: it is a linguistic marker rather than a legal concept requiring extended definition in its own right. The legal substance belongs to GRANT, which carries the full doctrinal weight.
Burrill's compression of graunte and grava into a single entry is a feature of older legal dictionaries that organized entries by page rather than by strict conceptual separation. Researchers should not read any substantive connection between the two terms from their co-location.
Other historical law dictionaries (Cowell, Blount, Tomlin, Black's early editions) address the concept under GRANT rather than graunte, which confirms that by the time most legal dictionaries were compiled in English, the Law French form had become a historical reference point rather than an operative term.
Jurisdictional Note
Graunte is specific to English legal history and has no operative use in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. American law adopted grant as the standard term from its earliest period, and graunte appears in American legal materials only in quotations from English sources or in historical scholarship.