Definition
In old European law, to return or resign an investiture, seisin, or possession that had previously been received; to reinvest; to re-enfeoff. The term describes the act by which a grantee or feoffee restored land or a feudal holding back to the grantor or a third party through a formal reversal of the original investiture. It is the procedural counterpart to investiture: where investiture conveyed possession into a holder's hands through ceremony, revestire was the mechanism for returning it.
Common Confusion
REVESTIRE should not be confused with the modern concept of reinvestment in a financial or corporate sense, nor with reversion. Reversion describes a future interest that automatically returns to a grantor by operation of law when a lesser estate expires; revestire was an active, voluntary act of resignation or re-enfeoffment, not an automatic legal consequence. The distinction matters when reading medieval land records or feudal tenure sources where the two concepts may appear in proximity.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources treating feudal tenure and the early common law of real property. Researchers encountering revestire in historical documents should understand they are dealing with the mechanics of feudal land transfer, not a living doctrine of modern law.
The term is essentially confined to pre-modern European and English land law. By the time English common law had systematized its forms of conveyance, the formal vocabulary of investiture and revestire had largely receded into Latin treatises and glossaries. If you encounter it in primary sources, the surrounding context will almost always involve feoffment, seisin, or homage. Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum is the authority cited by both Black's editions and Burrill, and that work remains the most direct scholarly source for the term's feudal-law context.
Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should treat revestire as a doctrinal marker: its presence in a document signals that the source is either historical, antiquarian, or is drawing on continental feudal law traditions. It will not appear in modern common law pleading, statutory materials, or contemporary case law. Cross-referencing with entries on FEOFFMENT, SEISIN, INVESTITURE, and LIVERY OF SEISIN will provide the surrounding framework needed to interpret any passage where revestire appears.
No jurisdictional variation is meaningfully relevant because the term has no active application in any modern legal system.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term, all three tracking directly to Spelman as the authority. The uniformity is itself informative: this is not a term that generated doctrinal debate or evolved across jurisdictions. It was treated by all three dictionaries as a piece of learned historical vocabulary requiring identification rather than analysis.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is context for how revestire functioned procedurally within the feudal system — whether it required witnesses, ceremony, or charter, and how it interacted with the broader framework of feudal obligations. For that depth, researchers must go beyond the dictionary shelf to Spelman directly, or to treatises on feudal tenure such as those of Littleton, Coke, and later Blackstone's account of real property history.
Burrill's entry is notably terse even by the standard of these sources, moving immediately from revestire to "Review, Bill of" — a structural accident of alphabetical arrangement that underscores the term's marginal status in nineteenth-century legal lexicography.