Definition
Latin: "Under condition" or "upon condition." A term of art from old English conveyancing used to create an estate upon condition — that is, a grant of land or property interest that is subject to being defeated or limited by the occurrence or non-occurrence of a specified event. When inserted in a deed, sub conditione operated as the most direct and technically proper way to impose a condition on a conveyance, triggering the legal consequences that attended conditional estates under common law property doctrine.
Common Confusion
Sub conditione is occasionally conflated with terms that create limitations rather than conditions. A limitation (as in a fee simple determinable) causes an estate to expire automatically upon a triggering event; a condition (as created by sub conditione) gives the grantor a right of re-entry but does not defeat the estate automatically. The legal consequences are different — particularly regarding whether the original grantor or heirs must act to reclaim the property — and the distinction was carefully maintained at common law. Finding sub conditione in a historical instrument identifies the grant as conditional, not determinable, unless surrounding language suggests otherwise.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering sub conditione in historical deeds, land grants, or property records should recognize it as a operative term of conveyancing art, not mere descriptive language. Its presence signals that the grantor intended to create a condition — not a covenant, limitation, or trust — with the specific legal consequences that distinction carries: conditions defeat estates upon breach, while covenants only generate damages. The difference matters enormously when tracing chain of title or evaluating whether a historical forfeiture claim was legally cognizable.
The term appears most heavily in English common law records from the medieval and early modern periods and in American colonial-era land grants that tracked English conveyancing forms. It falls out of routine use as English-language conveyancing practice displaces Latinate formulae in the nineteenth century. Researchers working in post-1800 American sources will rarely encounter it in active use, though it surfaces in treatise discussions of conditional estates and in reported cases parsing the meaning of older instruments.
Because sub conditione was understood to create a condition by its own force — without need of additional explanatory language — its presence or absence in a historical instrument is legally significant. Courts applying common law rules to old deeds sometimes turned on whether this phrase or its equivalents appeared, because conditions were not lightly implied. A researcher reading Littleton, Coke on Littleton, or English Year Book materials will find this term treated as a technical marker distinguishing conditions from lesser property qualifications.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three shelf sources are in close agreement on core meaning. All define sub conditione as "upon condition" or "under condition" and situate it within old conveyancing practice. Burrill's entry is the most informative: it identifies the term as one of the words which, "by virtue of themselves," make estates upon condition, citing Littleton's Tenures (§ 328) and Coke's commentary (Co. Litt. 203a; 10 Co. 42a). This self-operative quality — the phrase doing legal work on its own without further elaboration — is the essential point that Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence mention only indirectly or not at all.
Burrill also preserves Coke's characterization of sub conditione as "the most express and proper [words of] condition in deeds," which is important context: it tells the researcher that other phrasings could also create conditions, but this was the paradigm case. None of the three dictionaries discuss how courts treated the term when the condition's content was ambiguous or when sub conditione appeared alongside words of limitation — a gap that must be filled by consulting primary sources such as Coke's Institutes and Littleton's Tenures directly.