Definition
In law, RAIN (also spelled "rain" in early Anglo-French legal records) is an archaic Law French term meaning a ring. It appears almost exclusively in the formulaic phrase *par rain et baston* (by ring and staff), which described the symbolic ceremony by which a feudal lord or grantor conveyed property or seisin to another party. The ring and staff were physical objects held during the ceremony of livery of seisin, functioning as tokens of the transfer of possession. The term has no independent modern legal meaning and survives only as a relic of medieval conveyancing vocabulary.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Condensed water falling from a cloud; any matter moving or falling through air in a manner figuratively identifiable with raindrops.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Listed as an obsolete spelling of "reign," attributed to Spenser.
The gap here is complete. The legal term RAIN shares no semantic connection with precipitation or with the English word "reign." It is a Law French term (from the Old French *rain*, meaning ring) that entered English legal records through the Norman legal vocabulary of medieval England. A researcher encountering the word in a historical legal document should not read it as the common English noun or as the archaic spelling of "reign" but as the technical Law French term for ring.
Common Confusion
Three distinct words collide at this spelling in historical sources: the English common noun for precipitation, the obsolete English spelling of "reign" noted by Spenser and recorded in Webster's 1913, and the Law French legal term for ring. The confusion is compounded because early legal manuscripts used inconsistent orthography. Kelham's Norman-French dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary both record *rain* as the Law French term for ring, which is the authoritative legal reading when the word appears in a feudal conveyancing context.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern conveyancing records, Year Books, or older English equity materials may encounter *rain* in formulaic phrases describing livery of seisin. The critical research trap is misreading the word as either the common English noun or as an archaic form of "reign," both of which would produce a nonsensical reading of the legal text.
The phrase *par rain et baston* (by ring and staff) is a set phrase of art. Finding it in a document signals that the researcher is reading a record of symbolic delivery of possession — one of the foundational acts of feudal land transfer. Understanding the phrase correctly connects the document to the broader corpus of livery of seisin materials, feoffment records, and early common law property doctrine.
Because this term is purely historical, it does not appear in modern statutory codes or case reporters. Research use is confined to: medieval and early modern land records, Year Book annotations, Norman-French legal glossaries, and treatises on the history of real property law. Burrill, Kelham, and Tomlin's Law Dictionary are the primary reference points on the Law Mind shelf.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary records the term concisely: "L. Fr. A ring. par baston; by ring and staff. Par rain et Kelham." This entry does two things: it confirms the meaning (ring) and it immediately situates the term within its only meaningful legal context (the symbolic delivery phrase). The brevity of the entry reflects the term's narrow function — it was never a free-standing legal concept but always a component of a ceremonial formula.
Historical dictionaries are broadly consistent on this point. Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman-French Language* (1779), which Burrill cites, likewise records *rain* as ring in the context of feudal ceremony. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the paleographic confusion the term creates for modern researchers unfamiliar with Law French orthography, since the word looks identical to the common English noun on the page.