Definition
In old English law, to grant a hereditary right; to make a donation hereditary by conferring it upon the grantee and his heirs. The act of hzeretare transformed what might otherwise be a personal or life grant into an inheritable interest, passing the donated property or right through the grantee's bloodline rather than expiring at the grantee's death.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in medieval English legal records and glossaries. Its practical significance lies in the distinction it marks between grants limited to a single life and grants vesting a heritable estate — a distinction that carried enormous consequences in feudal land tenure. When reading early English charters or conveyancing instruments, the presence or absence of language equivalent to hzeretare signals whether the grantor intended to create what later common law would recognize as a fee simple (or fee tail) as opposed to a life estate.
The term itself is rare enough that it will not appear in most working legal research collections beyond Black's and a handful of specialized glossaries of medieval Latin and Law French. Researchers tracing the historical development of heritable estates, words of inheritance, or the formulaic "and his heirs" requirement in early conveyancing should treat hzeretare as a conceptual ancestor to those doctrines rather than an operative term in any modern or even early modern legal context. It drops out of practice well before the period covered by standard English case reporters.
Cross-referencing Cowell's Interpreter (the authority Black's cites) is essential for any serious archival work with this term. Cowell's original entry situates the word within the broader vocabulary of Latin-inflected medieval English legal drafting, and researchers should consult that source directly rather than relying solely on Black's summary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the sole dictionary entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term, citing Cowell's Interpreter as its authority. The definition is brief and consistent with what Cowell's glossary supplies: the term describes the act of rendering a grant heritable, extending the donation to the grantee's heirs. No divergence or competing definition exists within the available sources, which reflects the term's narrow technical use and its obsolescence even by the time the major historical legal dictionaries were compiled. Bouvier and later American dictionaries do not appear to carry the term, suggesting it was understood as a historical curiosity rather than a living legal concept by the nineteenth century. The absence of the term from American legal dictionaries is itself informative: it did not migrate into the common law vocabulary of the United States, where heritable estates were handled through the established formulary of fee simple conveyancing.