Extracted From:
  A LAW DICTIONARY ..., SIXTH EDITION, 1856
  by John Bouvier
  CHILDS & PETERSON, PHILADELPHIA

LIVERY, Engl. law.
   1. The delivery of possession of lands to those tenants who hold of the king
in capite, or knight's service. 
   2. Livery was also the name of a writ which lay for the heir of age, to
obtain the possession of seisin of his lands at the king's hands.... It
signifies, in the third place, the clothes given by a nobleman or gentleman to
his servant. 

LIVERY OF SEISIN, estates. A delivery of possession of lands, tenements, and
hereditaments, unto one entitled to the same. This was a ceremony used in the
common law for the conveyance of real estate; and the livery was in deed, which
was performed by the feoffor and the feoffee going upon the land, and the latter
receiving it from the former; or in law, where the game was not made on the
land, but in sight of it.... 
   In most of the states, livery of seisin is unnecessary, it having been
dispensed with either by express law or by usage. The recording of the deed has
the same effect. In Maryland, however, it seems that a deed cannot operate as a
feoffment, without livery of seisin....

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