[see -EE.] a. Legal and gen. The person to whom a promise by covenant is made. The correlative of COVENANTOR.
1649. W. Ball, Power of Kings, 8. Even so it is between the King, who is Covenantor by Oath, and the People who are Covenantees concerning Lawes and Statutes … to be enacted.
1768. Blackstone, Comm., III. 156. If a man covenants to be at York by such a day … and is not at York at the time appointed … these are direct breaches of his covenant; and may be perhaps greatly to the disadvantage and loss of the covenantee.
1818. Cruise, Digest (ed. 2), I. 101. If a tenant in tail covenants to stand seised to the use of the covenantee for life.
1885. Law Times Rep., LIII. 308/1. The reasons for making the trustees covenantees are that the husband cannot covenant with his wife.
b. Theol. One admitted into God’s covenant with His people.
1692. Beverley, Disc. Dr. Crisp, 1. The Covenantees according to the faultless Covenant must so continue in it, that God may be for ever their God, and they his People.
1702. C. Mather, Magn. Chr., V. III. (1852), 295. To be in covenant, or to be a covenantee is the formalis ratio of a church member.
1726. Ayliffe, Parergon, 105. Both of them were the respective Rites of their Admission into the several Covenants, and the Covenantees became thereby entitled to the respective Privileges which were annex’d to them.
