Definition
In feudal and early common law, *perquirere* is a Latin term meaning to gain, acquire, or purchase property through one's own act or agreement — as distinguished from acquiring property by descent or inheritance. The term encompasses voluntary acquisition: buying, exchanging, or otherwise obtaining title through deliberate legal act rather than through operation of law upon a predecessor's death.
The related noun form, *perquisitio*, carries the same core meaning and is the root of the English legal term "purchase" in its technical sense. In this feudal context, "purchase" did not mean simply a sale for money; it meant any acquisition of land by the acquirer's own agency, standing in direct contrast to descent through bloodline.
A specific usage, *breve perquirere*, meant to purchase or obtain a writ — the procedural act of securing the formal legal instrument needed to initiate proceedings.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): *Perquirere* has no entry in modern general dictionaries. It is a Latin legal term without a surviving common English counterpart in everyday use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term was confined to legal and scholarly Latin usage even in the nineteenth century.
The modern English word "perquisite" (often shortened to "perk") descends from the same Latin root and originally carried a legal meaning: something acquired beyond ordinary entitlement, a gain over and above regular income. The modern colloquial sense of "perk" — an employment benefit or privilege — has drifted far from the feudal legal meaning of acquisition by one's own act. Researchers encountering "perquisites" in older legal sources should not assume the modern employment-benefit sense.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a gateway to understanding the foundational feudal distinction between *purchase* and *descent* — a distinction that shaped English real property law for centuries and carries forward residual significance in modern title and inheritance analysis.
**The meaning of "purchase" trap.** Modern researchers reading older property materials risk misreading "purchase" as a simple commercial sale. In texts invoking *perquirere* or *perquisitio*, purchase means any acquisition by one's own act: gift, devise, exchange, or sale all qualify. Descent — inheriting through bloodline — is the opposite pole. Failing to grasp this binary distorts reading of feudal tenure documents, early conveyancing treatises, and any common law materials treating the incidents of tenure differently depending on how land was acquired.
**Blackstone as bridge.** Burrill's entry cites 2 Bl. Com. 241, where Blackstone explains *perquisitio* as the technical term for purchase in its broad sense. Researchers working with Blackstone's Commentaries in the Law Mind corpus will find that passage essential to grounding this term in systematic common law doctrine.
**Feudal tenure incidents.** The perquirere/descent distinction was not merely taxonomic. Whether land came by purchase or descent affected which feudal incidents — relief, wardship, primer seisin — attached. In historical legal disputes over these incidents, the mode of acquisition was a live legal question.
**Writ practice.** The phrase *breve perquirere* (to purchase a writ) is a reminder that in early common law procedure, writs were not automatically issued but had to be affirmatively obtained from Chancery. Researchers encountering this phrase in procedural sources should read it as the act of initiating legal process, not merely as a commercial transaction.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary treatment in the current corpus. Burrill traces the term accurately to its feudal roots, glosses it as "to gain or acquire; to acquire by one's own act; to purchase," and links it to Cowell (for *breve perquirere*) and Blackstone's Commentaries for *perquisitio*. The entry is compact but reliable, correctly identifying the central distinction from descent.
What Burrill does not provide is doctrinal development: how the purchase/descent distinction operated in practice across different forms of feudal tenure, how it eroded as the feudal system declined, or how residual traces of the distinction survived into modern real property law (for example, in rules governing the direction of descent for ancestral versus purchased land, which persisted in some American jurisdictions into the nineteenth century). Researchers needing that doctrinal depth should move from Burrill's entry to Blackstone and from there to the relevant encyclopedia treatment.
No entry for this term appears in standard modern legal dictionaries, reflecting its status as a term of art now absorbed into the broader vocabulary of property law rather than used as a freestanding term of practice.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Purchase (Property Law)
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Feudal Tenure
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Descent and Distribution
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