Definition
A Law French plea meaning "nothing passed by the deed." In historical pleading practice, riens passa per le fait was the proper form of denial available to a party seeking to avoid the operation of a deed that had been enrolled or acknowledged in court. Where a deed had been formally enrolled or acknowledged before a court — giving it a quasi-record character — the ordinary denial of non est factum (not his deed) was not permitted. The party disputing the deed's operative effect was instead required to plead riens passa per le fait, asserting that despite the existence of the instrument, no property or interest actually passed by reason of it.
The plea did not contest the execution of the deed as such; rather, it challenged whether the deed accomplished any legal conveyance — that is, whether it was effective to pass title or interest to the grantee. The distinction is significant: non est factum denies that the instrument is the defendant's deed at all, while riens passa per le fait admits the deed's existence but denies its operative legal consequence.
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Common Confusion
RIENS PASSA PER LE FAIT vs. NON EST FACTUM
These two pleas are the most common source of confusion when encountering enrollment-related deed disputes in historical sources. Non est factum denies the deed itself — the party says, in effect, "I did not make that instrument." Riens passa per le fait accepts the instrument but denies that any conveyance occurred through it. The procedural constraint that makes riens passa per le fait necessary is the enrolled or court-acknowledged deed: once a deed achieved that status, non est factum was unavailable, and the challenger had to use the specialized form. Researchers who encounter non est factum in a pleading record should check whether the deed was enrolled; if it was, the pleading may be defective under historical practice.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English common law sources and will be encountered primarily in Year Books, early real property treatises, and pleading manuals predating the procedural reforms of the nineteenth century. It is essentially a dead form — abolished along with the formal system of special pleading — and has no operative role in modern practice.
For corpus researchers, the key navigational points are:
The plea arises specifically in the context of enrolled deeds. Any source discussing it will be embedded in the broader history of deed enrollment, the distinction between deeds of record and deeds inter partes, and the procedural rules governing challenges to each. Researchers tracing deed enrollment practice should treat this plea as a marker for that cluster of materials.
The phrase is Law French and will appear in older sources in variant spellings and sometimes in partial or abbreviated form. Burrill's citation to Yearb. 9 Hen. VI. 60 and 1 Gilb. Evid. 145 provides traceable primary anchors in the Year Books and Gilbert on Evidence. Hilliard's Real Property is a nineteenth-century American treatise, indicating the concept survived in American real property scholarship even after its procedural context had largely dissolved.
The relationship to non est factum is the analytical hinge. Encountering this plea in a historical record signals that the deed in question had been enrolled or court-acknowledged — that background fact is the reason the specialized plea was required. Working backward from the plea form to the nature of the deed can help reconstruct the procedural posture of a historical dispute.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree completely on the core definition and are remarkably consistent in their language — Black's and Burrill's reproduce nearly identical text, suggesting a shared source tradition, likely the Year Book and Gilbert foundations Burrill cites explicitly. Rapalje and Lawrence offer a slightly broader framing, describing the plea as the proper form to deny "the validity or effect of a conveyance" without restricting it to the enrolled-deed context, which is arguably an overgeneralization. Black's and Burrill's are more precise in flagging that the enrolled or acknowledged character of the deed is what triggered this form's necessity and displaced non est factum.
None of the three source dictionaries discuss the plea's abolition or its fate under procedural reform, which reflects the purely historical orientation of these works. A researcher relying solely on these entries would not learn that the plea has no modern application or that the underlying conceptual distinction between challenging execution and challenging operative effect persists in different doctrinal clothing under modern law (through, for example, challenges to whether a deed was delivered or whether conditions precedent to conveyance were met).
The Burrill citation to Yearb. 9 Hen. VI. 60 is the most useful research anchor in the historical dictionary support: it places the plea firmly in early fifteenth-century English practice and offers a primary source point of entry for researchers working in that period.
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Jurisdictional Note
This plea belongs to English common law pleading history and has no continuing procedural life in any common law jurisdiction. American treatises such as Hilliard's Real Property addressed it as historical context for understanding deed conveyancing doctrine, not as operative pleading practice. The underlying substantive question — whether a deed effectively passed title — survives in modern real property law but is litigated through entirely different procedural vehicles.
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