Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "this is an agreement." The phrase served as the formal opening words with which written agreements and contracts were traditionally commenced in medieval English legal practice. It functioned as a declaratory preamble — a ritualized announcement that what followed was a binding covenant between parties. The phrase is sometimes rendered in variant spellings reflecting the idiosyncratic orthography of early legal manuscripts and Year Books.
Common Confusion
The phrase is frequently encountered in variant or corrupted forms in manuscript sources and early printed legal texts. The rendering "Hjec Est Gonventio" almost certainly reflects a transcription or typographical corruption of the classical Latin "Haec Est Conventio," where "Haec" (feminine demonstrative pronoun, "this") has been misread or misprinted as "Hjec," and "Conventio" (agreement, covenant) as "Gonventio." Researchers encountering either form in historical sources should treat them as the same phrase. The distinction matters because catalog searches and index terms in manuscript collections may not account for both spellings.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is a navigational landmark in early English contract documents and plea roll entries rather than a substantive legal concept. Its primary research value is identificatory: when encountered in a medieval legal instrument, it signals the opening of a formal agreement and orients the reader to what follows as contractual rather than testamentary, declaratory, or pleading in character.
Researchers working in Year Book materials, plea rolls, or early common law manuscript collections should be aware that the opening formula of an agreement had legal significance beyond mere convention. The presence or absence of proper formal words could affect enforceability and the form of action available to a plaintiff. A document lacking the expected introductory language might be treated differently in pleading than one that conformed to established form.
The corrupted spelling in the Black's 2nd Edition Supplemental entry is itself a research trap. The entry reads "Hjec Est Gonventio," but this is a typesetting artifact, not an alternative Latin form. A researcher who searches historical indexes or catalogs using the corrupted spelling will miss the majority of instances, which will be indexed under "Haec Est Conventio" or simply "conventio." Cross-referencing both forms is essential when working with printed digests and abridgments from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which themselves sometimes reproduced earlier typographical errors.
The Year Book citation in Black's — Yearb. H. 6 Edw. II. 191 — places this usage in the reign of Edward II, early fourteenth century, confirming the phrase's deep antiquity in the common law tradition. Researchers tracing the history of contract formalities in English law will find such Year Book references useful as primary evidence of how agreements were constituted and identified before modern contract doctrine developed.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) Supplemental is the sole dictionary source for this entry, and its treatment is minimal: a one-line identification of the phrase as Latin for "this is an agreement," a note that it comprised the opening words of ancient agreements, and a Year Book citation. No other historical legal dictionary in the standard shelf corpus independently entries this phrase, which reflects its status as a formulaic term of art rather than a doctrinal concept requiring extended treatment.
The Black's entry is useful but should be approached with caution given the apparent typographical corruption in the headword itself. The cited Year Book reference (H. 6 Edw. II. 191) is consistent with the period when formal contract pleading language was being consolidated in early common law practice, though verification against the original Year Book text is advisable before relying on the citation in scholarly work.
What historical dictionaries as a class tend to underserve here is the broader context of opening formulae in medieval instruments. "Haec Est Conventio" belongs to a family of formal introductory phrases — alongside instruments beginning with "Sciant presentes et futuri" or "Noverint universi" — each of which signaled a particular documentary type. That classificatory function is more fully illuminated in diplomatic and legal history scholarship than in law dictionaries.