The gift of any corporeal hereditament to another, (2 Bl. Comm. 310), operating by transmutation of possession, and requiring, as essential to its completion, that the seisen be passed, (Watk. Conv. 183), which might be accomplished either by investiture or by livery of seisin. Also the deel or conveyance by which such corporeal hereditament is passed.
A feoffment originally meant the grant of a , feud or fee; that is, a barony or knight’s fee, for which certain services were due from the feoffee to the feoffor. This was the proper sense of the word; but by custom it came afterwards to signify also a grant (with livery of seisin) of a free Inheritance to a man and his heirs, referring rather to the perpetuity of the estate than to the feudal tenure. 1 Reeve, Eng. Law, 90, 91. It was for ages the only method (in ordinary use) for conveying the freehold of land in possession, but has now fallen in great measure into disuse, even in England, having been almost entirely supplanted by some of that class of conveyances founded on the statute law of the realm. 1 Steph. Comm. 467, 468. Feoffmeat to uses. A feoffment of lands to one person to the use of another.