Subjects - Buy/Sell a home - More food for thought - Covenants
This word has two meanings.
It's an old fashioned legal term for an Agreement or Contract, and it frequently pops up in religious discourse, because it's frequently in the bible with that meaning. E.g., a Covenant with God means an Agreement with God.
In more down to earth settings, the term is most frequently come across in relation to ownership of houses where you might often hear the expression that the house is subject to a Covenant, which just means some sort of obligation to refrain from doing something or other in the house in question.
Covenants tends to be imposed on houses when they are first built to try and ensure that the tone of the neighbourhood is not lowered by people getting up to unneighbourly things in their nice new houses, although precisely what constitutes unneighbourliness tends to vary down the ages.
If you house dates from Victorian times then they may well be a covenant on the deeds saying for example, that you are not allowed to breed maggots or boil bricks on the premises.
More modern housing developments tends to come with pages and pages of Covenants.