Definition
Original conveyances — also called primary conveyances — are the foundational common law instruments by which a property interest or estate is first created or brought into existence. They stand in contrast to derivative conveyances (sometimes called secondary conveyances), which presuppose an existing estate and operate to enlarge, confirm, or defeat it.
Blackstone identified six categories of original conveyances: feoffment, gift, grant, lease, exchange, and partition. Each operated as an independent source of title rather than a transfer of something already held by another in a different form.
- Feoffment: The oldest and most formal method of transferring freehold estates in land, accomplished by livery of seisin — a physical act of delivery on the land itself.
- Gift: The conveyance of a fee tail estate, distinguishable from feoffment by the nature of the estate created.
- Grant: The transfer of incorporeal hereditaments (rights such as easements or rents) that could not be physically delivered and therefore passed by deed alone.
- Lease: The creation of a possessory interest for a term of years or other limited duration, generating an estate less than freehold.
- Exchange: A mutual grant of equal interests in land between two parties, each taking the other's property in return.
- Partition: The division of property held in co-ownership, converting concurrent interests into separate, individual ones.
Common Confusion
Original conveyances are frequently encountered in historical sources alongside derivative (or secondary) conveyances, and researchers sometimes conflate the two categories or treat the distinction as merely academic. The distinction is substantive: derivative conveyances — including releases, confirmations, surrenders, assignments, and defeasances — operate only upon an estate already in existence. An original conveyance creates the estate from scratch. Misreading a historical instrument's classification affects how title chains are traced and how gaps or breaks in chain of title are interpreted.
The term "original" here does not mean the first document in a chain of title for a particular parcel. It means the category of instrument that creates rather than modifies an interest. A lease executed in 1950 is still an original conveyance even if the land changed hands twenty times before.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively encountered in historical legal sources — treatises, early American deed records, colonial-era land grants, and common law commentaries. Modern property law has largely abandoned the taxonomy, and contemporary practitioners rarely use this vocabulary. Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century materials need to recognize the classification system to understand how courts and commentators analyzed title questions.
Key research traps:
The word "original" is misleading to modern eyes. A researcher scanning an antebellum treatise may assume "original conveyance" refers to the founding deed in a chain of title for a specific property. It does not. The term is categorical, not chronological.
Feoffment, the first and most important of the original conveyances, was abolished in England by the Real Property Act of 1845 and had already fallen into disuse in most American jurisdictions well before that. References to feoffment in American sources after roughly the early nineteenth century are almost always historical or explanatory in nature, not operative.
The partition entry in this category requires care. Partition as an original conveyance refers to the voluntary division of co-owned property by agreement. Judicial partition — the court-ordered division or sale of co-owned property — is a creature of equity and statute and operates under different rules. Historical sources do not always make this distinction explicit.
Lease's inclusion as an original conveyance surprises some researchers accustomed to thinking of leases as mere possessory arrangements. At common law, the lease was genuinely creative — it carved a new estate (the term of years) out of the fee. This classification mattered for questions of privity and for the running of covenants.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Bouvier's, and Burrill's are in complete agreement on this term — all three track Blackstone's Commentaries, Book II, Chapter 9, virtually verbatim, and all three cite 2 Bl. Comm. 309 as authority. This unanimity reflects the fact that the classification was settled common law doctrine codified by Blackstone rather than a contested concept. Bouvier adds a secondary citation to Stephens' Commentaries (11th ed., p. 464), providing a useful nineteenth-century English treatise cross-reference for researchers working that tradition.
What the historical dictionaries do not do is address the American reception of this framework or flag that most of the operative force of these distinctions had already eroded by the time the dictionaries were written. Black's first edition appeared in 1891; by then, the Statute of Uses had already collapsed much of the technical difference between legal and equitable conveyancing, and American deed practice had standardized around the grant deed and warranty deed in ways that made the six-category taxonomy largely descriptive rather than operative. Researchers should treat these definitions as guides to reading older sources, not as statements of law in force.
Burrill's Law Dictionary, though less widely cited than Black's or Bouvier's, is particularly useful for common law property research because of its more expansive treatment of real property terminology derived from English sources.
Jurisdictional Note
The original conveyances taxonomy is a product of English common law and was received into American law through the colonial and early state period. Louisiana, as a civil law jurisdiction, never adopted this framework. In other American jurisdictions, the practical significance of the distinction was extinguished by recording acts, deed standardization, and the abolition of livery of seisin, though the vocabulary persists in older judicial opinions and title opinions.