Definition
A redemise is the regranting or reconveyance of a leased or demised estate back to the person who originally granted it. In practice, it describes the act by which a lessee or tenant conveys the same property back to the lessor, typically as part of a structured lease arrangement. The term appears most prominently in the historical conveyancing device known as a lease and release, and in related instruments where property passed back and forth between parties as a means of effecting a transfer of title.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The transfer of an estate back to the person who demised it; reconveyance."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To demise back; to convey or transfer back, as an estate."
The common and legal meanings here are unusually close, which reflects the term's narrow, technical character — it never crossed into ordinary speech in a way that diluted or altered its legal sense. The ordinary usage is simply a lay rendering of the legal operation, not a divergent meaning.
Common Confusion
Redemise is sometimes loosely conflated with release or surrender of a lease, but these are distinct operations. A surrender extinguishes the lease and merges the tenant's interest back into the landlord's estate; a release conveys a right or interest to someone already holding possession. A redemise, by contrast, is a fresh granting back — the lessee re-demises the property to the original grantor, creating a new tenancy relationship rather than simply terminating the old one. The distinction mattered in historical conveyancing because the legal effect on title, seisin, and intervening interests differed depending on which instrument was used.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering redemise in primary sources should place it firmly in the context of pre-modern conveyancing practice, particularly the lease-and-release transaction that dominated English land transfer from the seventeenth century until the English Real Property Act of 1845 largely displaced it. In that device, a landowner would first lease the property to the intended grantee (creating possession without livery of seisin), and the grantee would then take a release of the freehold. The redemise entered this framework when the flow of interests needed to be reversed or refined — for instance, when the original grantor resumed a term from the grantee as part of a complex settlement.
American sources use the term sparingly after the colonial period, and most nineteenth-century American jurisdictions had simplified conveyancing sufficiently that redemise as a formal operative word lost practical importance. Researchers working in early American deed records, particularly in jurisdictions that followed English conveyancing forms closely (Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, New York), may encounter redemise in instruments drafted before local statutes simplified title transfer. When the term appears in those records, the surrounding instrument — its recitals, the parties' positions, and the consideration — will clarify whether an actual tenancy back to the grantor was intended or whether the word is vestigial formalism.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is notably corrupted in surviving sources, running redemise into adjacent material on redemption and reddendo singula singulis. Researchers using that dictionary should treat the redemise entry with caution and cross-check against Black's.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries converge on the same core definition: a regranting of land previously demised or leased. Black's (both editions) states it identically in substance, and Rapalje & Lawrence, despite the textual corruption in the surviving entry, points to the same concept. This unanimity reflects the term's narrow, settled meaning — it was never contested, merely technical.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is context for why the operation existed or how it functioned within the larger machinery of historical conveyancing. They treat redemise as a standalone definition rather than as a component of a broader transactional structure. Researchers relying solely on these entries will understand what the word means without understanding when and why it appeared in instruments. For that context, Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (Book II) and Preston's treatises on conveyancing remain the more useful reference points.
None of the source dictionaries address the American reception of the term or its decline after statutory conveyancing reform. That silence is itself informative: by the time Black's first edition appeared (1891), redemise was already largely historical in American practice.
Jurisdictional Note
Redemise has no meaningful modern jurisdictional variation because the term is effectively obsolete in active conveyancing practice across all U.S. jurisdictions. Its significance is historical and archival. English law retained the terminology longer, but the Law of Property Act 1925 rendered the underlying mechanisms largely unnecessary there as well.