Definition
Latin: "for counsel given." A phrase describing the consideration or basis upon which an annuity or grant is made — specifically, that the recipient provided advice or counsel to the grantor in exchange for the conveyance or periodic payment.
The legal significance of the phrase turns entirely on the type of instrument in which it appears:
1. In an annuity: When an annuity is granted pro consilio, the counsel to be given is treated as a condition of the grant. The annuity is executory — performance (the giving of ongoing counsel) remains outstanding — and the grantor's obligation is therefore contingent on the grantee's continued provision of that counsel. Failure to give counsel could defeat the annuity.
2. In a feoffment or lease for life: When pro consilio appears as the stated basis in a feoffment or a lease for life, it functions only as the consideration, not as a condition. Because the conveyance is executed — the estate in land passes immediately upon the feoffment — the grant of the annuity that accompanies it becomes executory, but the land interest itself is not held on condition of continued counsel. The distinction is between what has already passed (the freehold) and what remains to be performed.
This distinction between condition and consideration is the operative legal content of the term. A condition, if breached, can defeat or determine an estate; consideration, once exchanged, does not carry that consequence.
Common Confusion
The term is sometimes treated as interchangeable with "for services rendered" or general past consideration. This conflates two distinct ideas. Pro consilio is specifically tied to the giving of advice or counsel — an intellectual and ongoing service — not manual labor or commercial exchange. More importantly, whether the counsel is to be given in the future (making the grant conditional) or was given in the past (making it simple consideration) controls entirely different legal outcomes. Researchers reading historical instruments must determine the tense and context of the counsel obligation before characterizing the legal effect.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow Latin term of medieval and early modern property law, encountered almost exclusively in records involving annuities, feoffments, and life estates from the common law period before modern contract doctrine displaced these distinctions. Researchers working in English land records, Year Books, or Plowden's Commentaries will encounter it in discussions of conveyancing and the formal structure of grants.
The critical research trap is treating the term as a uniform label. As the historical sources make clear, pro consilio does not have a single legal effect — its consequences depend on the instrument type. An annotator who glosses the term simply as "for counsel given" without noting the condition/consideration split will miss the dispositive legal point.
The reference to Plowden's Commentaries (Plowd. 412) in multiple sources is a navigational anchor. Edmund Plowden's Commentaries (1571, covering cases from the reign of Edward VI through Elizabeth I) are a foundational Year Book-era source on real property doctrine and are the primary authority underlying this entry across all four dictionary sources. Researchers unable to locate the original case reasoning should consult Plowden directly for the full analysis of executory versus executed grants.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is notable for a different reason: the dictionary text runs together the pro consilio definition with an unrelated entry on pro rata abatement of legacies. This is a typographical artifact of the source, not a legal connection. Researchers extracting text from Rapalje & Lawrence should be alert to this formatting error, which may cause confusion in full-text searches or digitized corpora.
There is no modern equivalent doctrine under which this precise distinction continues to operate in the same form. The condition/consideration binary in executed versus executory grants has been substantially absorbed into modern contract and property law in ways that have dissolved the specific medieval framework pro consilio inhabited. The term is therefore primarily a tool for reading historical instruments, not a living doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four sources — Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier — are in substantive agreement and draw on the same underlying authority: Plowden 412. The definition is stable across the sources, with minor variation in phrasing. Black's second edition is the most complete, retaining the full doctrinal sentence explaining why a feoffment does not give the phrase the character of a condition. Bouvier follows essentially the same text.
Rapalje & Lawrence provides a truncated entry due to the formatting issue described above, cutting off the explanatory clause. Researchers relying solely on Rapalje & Lawrence for this term will have an incomplete picture.
None of the historical sources provide extended commentary beyond the single doctrinal proposition traced to Plowden. This is characteristic of the term's narrow scope — it is a Latin label for a specific rule rather than a broad legal concept requiring elaborate treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
Pro consilio is a term of English common law property doctrine with no significant jurisdictional variation across American jurisdictions, because the rule it describes was never transplanted into American property law as a live doctrine. It appears in American legal dictionaries as historical reference and as an aid to reading English source materials, not as operative law in any U.S. jurisdiction.