Definition
Simple warrandice is a covenant or obligation in Scots law by which a grantor of land or property warrants that neither the grantor nor anyone acting through the grantor's authority will subsequently disturb the grantee's title or possession. It is, in effect, a guarantee against the grantor's own future acts — not a guarantee against the claims of third parties or pre-existing encumbrances.
The obligation is narrower than absolute warrandice, which covers disturbance from any source, including prior rights and the claims of strangers. Simple warrandice binds the grantor only to refrain from personally creating or permitting acts that would undermine the title conveyed. If a third party with a pre-existing superior right evicts the grantee, simple warrandice provides no remedy.
Common Confusion
Simple warrandice is frequently confused with absolute warrandice and warrandice from fact and deed, the two other main forms of the obligation recognized in Scots law. The distinctions matter. Absolute warrandice is the strongest form, obliging the grantor to defend the grantee's title against all comers. Warrandice from fact and deed is narrower still than simple warrandice in some formulations, covering only acts already done at the time of the grant. Simple warrandice sits in the middle: prospective but limited to the grantor's own future conduct. A researcher who encounters warrandice language in historical deeds without identifying which form applies will misread the scope of the seller's obligation entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
Simple warrandice is a term of Scots property law with no direct English common law equivalent. Researchers working with Scottish conveyancing records, historical deeds, or comparative property law materials must recognize that the warrandice family of terms operates within a distinct legal tradition. The English concept of covenant for quiet enjoyment or warranty of title is an imperfect analogue and should not be substituted without care.
In historical corpus research, the term appears almost exclusively in Scottish legal sources — conveyances, feudal grants, and commentaries on Scots property law. It will not appear in English reports or American sources in its technical sense. If the term surfaces in an English or American context, treat it as borrowed terminology and verify whether it carries the same narrow Scots meaning or has been adapted.
The practical trap for researchers is the adjective "simple." In other legal contexts — simple contract, simple assault, fee simple — "simple" signals an absence of additional conditions or qualifications, and often implies a baseline or unqualified form. In warrandice, "simple" does not mean the most basic or comprehensive warranty. It means the most limited of the personal warranties, and it falls well short of the full protection a grantee might expect. Do not read "simple" here as synonymous with "absolute" or "general."
Corpus connections: warrandice questions frequently arise alongside feudal tenure research, Scottish land registration history, and comparative studies of civil-law versus common-law property traditions. Researchers tracing title chains in Scottish records will encounter all three warrandice forms and must distinguish them to assess the strength of any given conveyance.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are substantially consistent on the core definition. Black's Law Dictionary, Burrill's Law Dictionary, and Rapalje & Lawrence all reproduce substantially the same language: simple warrandice is an obligation to warrant or secure from all subsequent and future deeds of the grantor. Burrill and Black both add the clarifying gloss — "a simple warranty against the grantor's own acts" — attributing this formulation to Whishaw, a reference to Alexander Whishaw's A New Law Dictionary (1829), a standard source on Scots and English legal terms of that period.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary offers nothing substantive, directing readers elsewhere without completing the cross-reference — a known limitation of some Bouvier editions in covering distinctly Scottish doctrines. Rapalje & Lawrence reproduce the standard definition but the entry in the available source material is contaminated by an unrelated passage on mental illness, likely a printing or digitization error in the corpus version; researchers should treat that interpolated text as noise.
What the historical dictionaries do not do is situate simple warrandice within the full taxonomy of warrandice obligations or explain the practical consequences of receiving a deed with only simple rather than absolute warrandice. For that analytical depth, researchers should turn to institutional writers of Scots law — Stair, Erskine, or Bell — rather than to the general legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
Simple warrandice is a term of Scots law. It has no operative equivalent in English or American property law, though functional parallels exist in covenants of warranty and quiet enjoyment in common law conveyancing. Researchers should not apply this term to non-Scottish jurisdictions without explicit evidence that the parties or drafters adopted Scottish terminology by agreement or convention.