Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning sufferance or toleration — specifically, the passive permission that arises when a rightful possessor allows another to remain on or use property without objection, not through any affirmative grant but through inaction or neglect. The term appears in medieval legal texts to describe the conduct of a true owner whose failure to act effectively permits another's continued presence or claim. It is not a right conferred; it is the absence of enforcement that creates a legally recognized condition.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Sufferance" in modern English means patient endurance of pain, hardship, or wrong; also, tacit permission arising from failure to object.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Sufferance" is defined as the act of suffering, tolerating, or bearing; patient endurance; also, permission implicitly granted by not forbidding.
The common meaning of passive tolerance maps reasonably onto the legal use, but the gap lies in legal consequence: in law, sufferance is not mere endurance — it is a status-generating condition. The owner's inaction produces a recognized legal category (the tenant or possessor at sufferance) with defined, if limited, rights and obligations. Common usage misses this legal transformation from passivity to doctrine.
Common Confusion
SUFFRAUNCE (the Law French form) is simply the archaic spelling and French-derived form of the English legal term SUFFERANCE. Researchers encountering suffraunce in medieval or early modern texts should treat it as identical in meaning to sufferance and cross-reference accordingly. The confusion arises when researchers treat the variant spelling as a distinct term of art with separate meaning — it is not. The substantive doctrine is uniformly discussed in later sources under sufferance.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval English legal materials, particularly Britton and similar treatises compiled in Law French during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, will encounter suffraunce as the standard form of the word. The Burrill citation — par la suffraunce et la negligence le verey possessour — links suffraunce directly to the concept of the true possessor's neglect, connecting it to early possessory doctrine rather than to the later landlord-tenant framework most researchers associate with sufferance.
Two navigational traps exist. First, indexing in historical sources is inconsistent: some dictionaries and digests will index under sufferance, others under the French form, and still others may fold the concept into entries on possession or disseisin without using either spelling. Second, the pairing of suffraunce with negligence in the Britton formulation is significant — it signals that the doctrine in this early period operated as much as a limitation on the true possessor's remedies (by reason of his own delay or passivity) as it did as a description of the occupier's status. This is closer to laches or acquiescence than to the later technical category of tenancy at sufferance, and conflating the two distorts historical analysis.
Researchers tracing the evolution of possessory rights, landlord-tenant doctrine, or the law of disseisin should treat suffraunce as an early marker on a doctrinal line that runs forward into the fully developed concept of tenancy at sufferance in common law, but they should resist reading that later doctrine backward into the medieval usage.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source capturing this term in its Law French form, and its treatment is characteristically spare: a transliteration, a translation, and a single illustrative quotation from Britton. Burrill does not develop the doctrine, which reflects the dictionary's general approach to Law French entries — identification and translation rather than legal analysis.
What the historical dictionaries largely miss is the transitional character of the concept at this stage. The Britton formulation cited by Burrill places suffraunce alongside negligence as conditions that bear on the true possessor's position, suggesting a doctrine in formation rather than a settled rule. Later English legal dictionaries (Jacob, Tomlin, Bouvier) discuss sufferance primarily in the landlord-tenant context, by which point the earlier possessory dimension has receded. Researchers relying solely on later dictionaries will find a narrower and more settled doctrine than the medieval sources actually reflect.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Tenancy at Sufferance; Possession and Possessory Rights; Law French in English Legal Sources.