Definition
A habendum or appurtenance clause historically inserted in grants of land, markets, franchises, or other incorporeal hereditaments, conveying to the grantee not only the subject matter expressly described but also all associated privileges, exemptions, and customary rights attached to it. The phrase operated as a words-of-grant formula assuring the grantee that the conveyance carried with it the full bundle of ancillary entitlements that the grantor held or could lawfully pass — including rights of way, common of pasture, toll, passage, and similar customary incidents that had accrued to the property or franchise over time.
In practice, the clause served a dual function: it was simultaneously a grant of whatever liberties (formal legal privileges, often of royal or franchise origin) were annexed to the subject matter, and an assurance that the grantee would hold free of interference from the grantor or the grantor's heirs with respect to those customary incidents. In grants of markets and fairs, this language was especially significant because such grants carried with them the right to collect tolls, enforce market regulations, and exclude competing markets — privileges that might not be self-evident from the face of a bare conveyance of land alone.
Common Confusion
Researchers sometimes conflate "with all liberties and free customs" with the general appurtenance clause "with all appurtenances." While both are words of broad conveyance, they are not identical. "Appurtenances" is a broader modern term encompassing physical and legal incidents of land. "Liberties and free customs" is a more historically specific phrase pointing toward franchise rights and customary privileges of a quasi-public or royal-grant character. Substituting one for the other in analysis of a historical document risks mischaracterizing the nature of what was conveyed.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase belongs to the formulaic language of medieval and early modern conveyancing and is encountered most often in enrolled charters, royal grants, and later private grants that imitated royal form. Researchers working with pre-nineteenth-century land records, franchise grants, or municipal charter documents should treat it as a term of art signaling an appurtenance clause of maximum breadth — not as mere boilerplate to be skipped.
The practical trap in historical sources is assuming the clause was merely decorative. Courts construing grants containing this language treated it as substantive, sometimes finding that it passed rights the grantor had not individually enumerated. A grant of a market "with all liberties and free customs" could therefore carry toll rights, leet jurisdiction, or other franchise incidents that would otherwise require explicit grant. Researchers analyzing disputes over the scope of a market grant, a borough franchise, or a manorial right should check whether this clause appears, because its presence or absence could be outcome-determinative in the underlying dispute.
The phrase also connects directly to the broader corpus of appurtenance and habendum clause research. It is a cousin of clauses like "with all appurtenances" and "together with all easements, rights, and privileges," but its roots are older and its specific historical weight — carrying "liberties" as a category of franchise right and "free customs" as a category of established local privilege — is distinct. Modern conveyancing has largely replaced it with more comprehensive statutory or standardized appurtenance formulas, so its appearance in a document is itself a dating and provenance signal.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence do not provide a dedicated entry for this phrase. The closest entry in the source material addresses the phrase "belonging" in the context of a grant of market (citing 3 Ex. D. 292) and separately treats "with all suitable precautions" as a contractual standard (citing 20 Minn. 277). Neither entry directly glosses "with all liberties and free customs," which reflects a broader gap in the American legal dictionary tradition: formulaic conveyancing phrases drawn from English common law practice were often left undefined on the assumption that practitioners would encounter them through English treatises and precedent books rather than domestic dictionaries.
English legal dictionaries and glossaries of the nineteenth century — including Tomlin's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary — treat "liberties" and "free customs" individually but rarely synthesize the compound phrase. Tomlin defines "liberties" broadly as franchises or privileges granted by the crown, while Bouvier traces the same lineage. "Free customs" in the older literature refers to customary rights enjoyed by the inhabitants of a borough or manor without payment of special toll or impost — a meaning that is coherent with and complementary to "liberties" in this phrase. The conjunction of the two terms in a conveyancing formula was well understood by English practitioners trained on Coke on Littleton and the Statute of Uses, but the phrase as a unit received little analytical treatment in the dictionary literature.
What the historical dictionaries miss is the operational significance of the clause in market and franchise grant litigation, where courts were called upon to determine exactly what rights passed by virtue of such language. The absence of dictionary treatment does not mean the phrase was unimportant — it means it was so familiar to the bar that lexicographers assumed no definition was needed.