Any study of early grants is subject to confusion. One cause is their diversity: the royal control which so quickly standardised litigation was slower to eliminate variations between customary arrangements, and a transaction unthinkable in Northamptonshire may have been commonplace in Norfolk. Another is the uneven survival of evidence. The grants most systematically preserved were those made by fine and those involving religious houses, and inferences may not apply to private grants between laymen. But the greatest difficulties are in our own minds. A modern deed of grant is the actual disposition; and if we remember livery of seisin at all, it is as a formality to be evaded. But charters were evidence, and the actual grant was made in a context not recorded, commonly, it seems, in a court. This links with the most intractable of our assumptions. We suppose a once-for-ever transfer of something like ownership; and whether or not the grantee can likewise pass that ownership on by his own voluntary act, we see it as passing on his death to his heir as by a modern rule of intestate succession. Conveyance, inheritance, litigation: for us these are distinct processes transferring or determining abstract rights. The ancient reality, preserved into later times only in the formalities of copyhold, saw all three as preliminaries to what mattered: the lord's acceptance of this tenant.