Definition
The act of selling; a sale. In legal usage, vendition refers to the completed act or transaction by which property is transferred from seller to buyer for consideration. The term appears most frequently in older common law and equity contexts, and survives in modern practice primarily through its derivative writ, the venditioni exponas.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of vending or selling; sale.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of vending, or selling; sale.
The common and legal definitions are essentially identical in meaning. The term is noted here only because it is archaic in ordinary English — modern speakers would say "sale" or "selling" — while it persists in legal contexts through the writ of venditioni exponas, giving it a technical foothold that the common language no longer provides.
Why It Matters in Research
Vendition itself is a simple term, but researchers encountering it in historical sources should treat it as a signal to look for its procedural companion: the writ of venditioni exponas. That writ is where the legal action lies. When reviewing older sheriff's records, execution proceedings, or equity pleadings, the appearance of "vendition" typically indicates a forced sale of property already seized under a fieri facias — not a voluntary commercial transaction.
The key research trap is treating vendition as a general synonym for "sale" in historical pleadings and thereby missing its procedural significance. In the context of execution practice, vendition was not just any sale; it was a court-compelled disposition of seized goods or lands. Corpus researchers should check whether the term appears alongside fieri facias, sheriff's return, or writ of execution, which will indicate that the document concerns enforcement of a judgment rather than ordinary commerce.
The term also surfaces in older state statutes governing sheriff's duties and execution sales. These statutes vary considerably by state and period, and the writ of venditioni exponas was not uniformly available in all American jurisdictions. Researchers working in nineteenth-century American legal materials should verify whether the jurisdiction in question recognized the writ and under what circumstances it could issue.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four historical sources — Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier — define vendition identically: "sale; the act of selling." This unanimity reflects the term's straightforwardness as a legal noun, and no meaningful divergence exists among the shelf sources on the bare definition.
Bouvier adds the most substantive material by appending a full entry for venditioni exponas, describing it as a writ directed to the sheriff commanding him to sell goods, chattels, and in some states lands, already taken under a fieri facias and remaining unsold. Bouvier notes that under this writ the sheriff is bound to sell and cannot simply return the property. This enforcement detail — that the sheriff has no discretion to withhold sale once the writ issues — is absent from the other sources and is the most legally consequential information associated with the term.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the writ's procedural relationship to the underlying judgment or its displacement by modern execution statutes. Researchers should not assume that the historical writ practice described by Bouvier reflects current procedure in any jurisdiction.
Jurisdictional Note
The writ of venditioni exponas, historically the primary procedural context in which vendition carried legal weight, has been largely superseded in American jurisdictions by modern execution statutes and rules of civil procedure. Some states retain statutory analogues; others have abolished the common law writ forms entirely. Researchers encountering venditioni exponas in historical documents should not assume the writ procedure survived in the jurisdiction under study without verifying local statutory history.