Definition
Licentia concordandi (Law Latin: "license to agree") is a formal procedural step in the old English practice of levying a fine of lands. It was the court's permission granted to the parties in a fictitious collusive suit to settle their dispute — that is, to "agree" or "concord" — thereby converting the staged litigation into a final, binding conveyance of real property. The licentia concordandi was not a license in the modern regulatory sense but rather a specific leave of court that activated the machinery of the fine and allowed the transaction to proceed to its conclusion.
Common Confusion
Licentia concordandi is easily collapsed with the fine itself, but they are distinct procedural moments. The fine was the completed conveyance — a recorded court judgment acknowledging the agreed terms of transfer. The licentia concordandi was the earlier, enabling step: without the court's formal leave to agree, the fiction of the suit could not lawfully resolve and the fine could not be levied. Researchers encountering historical conveyancing documents should be careful not to treat the license as evidence of a completed transfer; it signals only that the parties were permitted to proceed toward one.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth century English conveyancing records, legal history scholarship, and treatises on real property procedure. It has no living operational meaning in modern Anglo-American law. Researchers will encounter it primarily in three contexts: (1) historical title chains where land was conveyed by fine rather than deed; (2) treatises and commentaries on the old common law system of conveyancing, especially works discussing the formal steps of levying a fine; and (3) secondary literature on the abolition of fines and recoveries in England by the Fines and Recoveries Act 1833.
The key navigational point is that licentia concordandi is a term of art embedded in a now-defunct procedural system. Understanding it requires understanding the entire sequence of levying a fine, of which it was one part. Researchers working in early American colonial or post-colonial property records may also encounter fines levied under English practice, though this varied considerably by colony and state. The term will not appear in modern case law except in purely historical or academic contexts.
Because the term surfaces in records rather than arguments, the research trap is misreading a document that references the licentia concordandi as evidence of completed title without recognizing that it represents only a procedural prerequisite to the conveyance.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's entries are nearly identical, both citing Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Comm. 350) as the primary authority. This convergence reflects the term's narrow, technical scope: there is simply not much to disagree about. Both sources correctly characterize it as belonging to "old practice and conveyancing," signaling that even by the time these dictionaries were compiled, the term was historical rather than current.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any account of why the licentia concordandi existed — that is, what legal function the court's formal leave served within the fiction of the collusive suit, or how the step related to the subsequent acknowledgment (the concord) and the final enrollment of the fine. Blackstone himself provides the fuller picture: the entire proceeding was a legal fiction in which the parties pretended to litigate over title, then obtained leave to settle, and the "settlement" was enrolled as a court record that could not thereafter be disputed. The licentia concordandi was the hinge point in that fiction.
Burrill adds a cross-reference to "Fine of lands," which is the appropriate entry for understanding the broader procedural context — a pointer that Black's omits but which any serious researcher should follow.
Jurisdictional Note
The licentia concordandi was a feature of English common law practice and has no direct equivalent in modern American or English law. The Fines and Recoveries Act 1833 abolished the system in England. American jurisdictions that had adopted the English fine practice largely abandoned it by the mid-nineteenth century through statutory reform, though the timing varied by state.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Fine of Lands; Conveyancing (Historical); Fictitious Actions in Common Law Procedure.