Definition
An old law French term denoting the power or right to take a thing before it is offered. In feudal and common law property, prender describes a mode of acquiring or enjoying a right by direct taking, without waiting for another party to tender or deliver it. The term is most familiar in the distinction between rights that lie in prender and rights that lie in render.
A right was said to lie in prender when the entitled party could take it unilaterally — for example, estovers (the right to cut wood from land for fuel, fencing, or building). A right lay in render when it had to be paid or delivered by another person to the entitled party — rent being the paradigm example. The distinction was practically significant because rights lying in render required a grantor or debtor to perform an affirmative act, while rights lying in prender were self-executing.
The term also appears in the narrower fiscal context of the royal household: prender denoted a prerogative right of the Crown to take goods (provisions, supplies) from subjects before those goods were offered or sold on the open market, as a priority claim for the support of royal establishments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The power or right of taking a thing before it is offered.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The power or right of taking a thing before it is offered. — Burrill.
Editorial note: For once, common-language sources track the legal meaning almost exactly — but only because both Webster and Wiktionary borrowed directly from Burrill. Neither source conveys the doctrinal weight of the prender/render distinction or the feudal context in which the term did real legal work. A reader encountering prender in a modern dictionary would understand the surface definition while missing everything that makes it legally significant.
Common Confusion
Prender is easily conflated with its doctrinal twin, RENDER, particularly when encountered in older texts discussing profits à prendre or incorporeal hereditaments. The confusion is compounded by the fact that profit à prendre — a right to take something from another's land — shares the same etymological root (prendre, to take) but is a distinct and separately developed doctrine. Prender as a classification principle (lying in prender vs. lying in render) is not the same concept as a profit à prendre, which is a specific type of incorporeal right. Treating them as synonymous will cause misdirection in research.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter prender almost exclusively in older English and American common law sources dealing with incorporeal hereditaments, feudal tenure, or the law of real property. Several navigational points deserve attention.
First, the prender/render distinction is a structural classification tool in treatises on real property and servitudes. When reading Blackstone, Coke, or treatises on profits and easements, identifying which side of that line a given right falls on determines how that right is acquired, transferred, and enforced. Missing the distinction will produce misreadings of the underlying analysis.
Second, the royal household usage of prender (priority taking for the Crown before open market sale) appears in sources dealing with royal prerogative, purveyance, and feudal fiscal rights. These are entirely separate from the property-classification usage and require different context. The two meanings share a root concept (taking before offering) but operate in different legal domains.
Third, prender is essentially a dead term in modern American and English law. It does not appear in contemporary statutory codes or modern case law in its classical sense. Researchers encountering it in primary sources should treat it as a term of art requiring period-specific interpretation rather than a living doctrine.
Fourth, in the corpus, prender will appear most frequently in treatises and digests dealing with profits à prendre, estovers, common of pasture, and related incorporeal rights — even though, as noted above, prender-the-classification and profit-à-prendre are not the same concept. The clustering of these terms in the same sources creates genuine research noise.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most useful account, tracing the term to law French (prendre) and Latin (prehendere, to take), and supplying the practical doctrinal pairing: estovers as the example of a right lying in prender, rent as the example lying in render. This framing is the core of what the term meant in legal practice, and Burrill's entry is a reliable anchor for historical usage.
Rapalje & Lawrence emphasize the royal prerogative dimension — the right of the Crown to take goods for the royal household before they are offered — connecting prender to the broader apparatus of purveyance and royal fiscal privilege. This usage is historically authentic but represents a narrower and more specialized application of the underlying concept than Burrill captures.
Neither source addresses the risk of confusion with profit à prendre, which is a notable gap given how closely the two concepts appear in the same primary-source contexts. Researchers should not rely on either dictionary entry to distinguish them.
Jurisdictional Note
Prender as an operative legal concept is essentially confined to the historical English common law and its early American reception. It did not survive as a working term in American jurisdictions and has no statutory footing in any U.S. code. Researchers working in Scottish, Canadian, or other common law jurisdictions should note that the prender/render distinction appears in those traditions as well, though terminology and application may vary by source period.