Definition
A me (Latin: "from me") is a feudal term appearing in land grants to express that a tenant held an estate directly from the chief or superior lord, rather than through an intermediate lord. The phrase marked the tenure relationship at its highest point in the feudal hierarchy — the grantee owed obligations immediately to the grantor as sovereign or chief lord, with no mesne lord standing between them.
A secondary meaning, noted by Calvin and reproduced in both editions of Black's, applies in the context of wrongful detention of property: a person is said to withhold property "a me" — from me — when they have obtained possession of that property unjustly. In this sense, the phrase functions less as a term of art than as a grammatical construction from Latin legal pleading, identifying the aggrieved party whose property has been taken or withheld.
Common Confusion
A me is easily confused with its feudal counterpart de me, which expressed a different tenurial relationship. Where a me indicated direct tenure from the chief lord, de me indicated that the tenant held from the grantor who was himself a mesne lord — that is, the tenant held from the grantor, who in turn held from someone above. The distinction was consequential in feudal land law: the nature of the tenure relationship determined what incidents, services, and obligations attached. Burrill draws this contrast explicitly. Researchers encountering either phrase in historical conveyancing documents should pause to identify which term is actually present, as the two look similar in abbreviated or deteriorated manuscript sources.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively relevant to researchers working with feudal land tenure documents, Scottish and English medieval conveyancing records, or historical treatises on real property. In the Law Mind corpus, a me will surface in digests and treatises covering feudal tenure, not in modern case law or statutes.
Two research traps deserve attention. First, the phrase appears in Latin and may be rendered inconsistently across transcriptions — sometimes set off by punctuation, sometimes run into surrounding text, and in at least one edition of Black's reproduced with a typographical error (the character "@" substituted for "a"). Researchers consulting digitized or OCR-processed sources should account for these artifacts. Second, the dual meaning — direct tenure on one hand, wrongful detention on the other — requires contextual reading. A phrase like "withheld a me" is a pleading construction, not a tenure designation. These two usages are unrelated in origin and legal function, even though they share a Latin preposition.
The Bell's (Scotch) Appeal Cases reference (2 Bell, H. L. Sc. 133) cited by both Black's editions and Burrill is the sole supporting authority. Researchers who need to verify the feudal usage should consult that source directly; no modern secondary authority is likely to treat a me with any depth.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill are in agreement on the core feudal meaning: a me denotes direct tenure from the superior lord, citing the same Bell's Appeals authority. The editions diverge only in minor textual ways, including the typographical corruption in the 2nd edition ("@" for "a"), which is an artifact of typesetting rather than a substantive difference.
Burrill offers the more precise formulation by explicitly contrasting a me with de me, which Black's does not do. For feudal tenure research, Burrill's entry is therefore the more analytically useful of the two, despite its brevity.
The secondary meaning — wrongful detention — appears in Black's but not in Burrill, attributed to Calvin (presumably Johannes Calvin's legal lexicon, Lexicon Juridicum). This usage reflects Latin pleading conventions rather than feudal doctrine and is less developed in all three sources. None of the historical dictionaries provide case authority for it.
What the historical sources collectively miss: no discussion of how the a me / de me distinction interacted with specific feudal incidents such as wardship, relief, or escheat, nor any treatment of how the concept translated (or failed to translate) into post-feudal Anglo-American land law. Researchers expecting doctrinal depth will not find it here.
Jurisdictional Note
The feudal tenure meaning is grounded in Scottish and English land law. The Bell's Appeals citation is specifically Scottish. American law did not transplant feudal tenure doctrine in any operative sense, so a me as a tenure designation has no modern U.S. application. The Latin pleading construction (wrongful detention) could theoretically appear in early American common law pleadings, but no authority supports treating it as a distinct American legal term.