Definition
Per que servitia (Latin: "by which services") was a real action in English common law by which the grantee of a seigniory — that is, a person who had acquired a lord's feudal estate — could compel the grantor's tenants to formally acknowledge the new lord and render to him the feudal services they had previously owed to the grantor. The action enforced the legal relationship of tenure between a new seignior and existing tenants who had not yet given their formal acknowledgment, or attornment, to the incoming lord.
The action belongs to the machinery of the feudal land system, where the personal relationship between lord and tenant was considered integral to the validity of the tenure. A grant of a seigniory transferred the lord's position, but tenants were not automatically bound to the new grantee until they had formally attorned — that is, agreed to hold from and perform services for the new lord. Per que servitia provided the legal mechanism to compel that acknowledgment when tenants withheld it.
Common Confusion
Per que servitia is one of three closely related actions sometimes conflated in older sources. Quid juris clamat was brought by a lord against a tenant who had accepted a new tenant without the lord's consent. Ne vexes was an action to prevent a lord from distraining a tenant after the tenant had already attorned. Per que servitia is the action going the other direction: compelling tenants to attorn to a new lord in the first place. The distinctions matter when navigating historical digests organized by action type, as misidentification can send a researcher to the wrong cluster of materials.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term researchers will encounter only in historical English common law materials — primarily pre-nineteenth-century treatises, Year Books, and older digests. Its relevance is almost entirely archival. The action was abolished by the Fines and Recoveries Act, 3 & 4 William IV, c. 27, § 35 (1833), alongside other obsolete real actions, and it has no living counterpart in modern Anglo-American law.
Researchers tracing the history of real property actions, the law of tenure, or the doctrine of attornment will find per que servitia appearing in close proximity to related actions such as quid juris clamat and ne vexes. These three actions formed a cluster of feudal-era remedies concerned with the recognition and enforcement of tenurial relationships. Sources that discuss one typically discuss the others, so a researcher encountering per que servitia should expect the neighboring entries in historical dictionaries and treatises to be equally relevant.
A practical trap: because the action was obsolete well before the major American common law reception period, it appears in American legal materials only as a historical reference, never as a living remedy. Do not assume that pre-Civil War American treatises describing the action are describing an available procedure — they are invariably recounting English common law history.
The Latin phrase itself is worth noting for indexing purposes. Older sources may render it with variant spacing or hyphenation, and some digests index it under "que" rather than "per." Search strategies in digitized historical corpora should account for both the full phrase and truncated forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines per que servitia as a real action by which the grantee of a seigniory could compel the grantor's tenants to attorn to himself, noting its abolition by St. 3 & 4 Wm. IV, c. 27, § 35. This is the standard formulation that appears across the major historical dictionaries, and there is no meaningful divergence among sources on the core definition — the action was narrow, technical, and well-understood in its feudal context.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any sustained analysis of how the action related to the broader decline of real actions in English law. Per que servitia was not abolished in isolation; it fell as part of a systematic parliamentary effort to clear away the accumulated debris of feudal procedure. Researchers seeking that larger context will need to go beyond the dictionary shelf to histories of real property law and the parliamentary reform movement of the 1830s.
Jurisdictional Note
Per que servitia was purely an English common law action and was never a significant feature of American colonial or state practice, where feudal tenures were largely abolished or never took root. Researchers should not expect to find the action in American case law as a functioning remedy at any period.