Definition
Accessus (Latin) is an old English common law term for access, approach, or the liberty of entering upon another's land for a specific lawful purpose. It describes not ownership of land but a permissive right to pass over or onto it, typically in connection with the exercise of some ancillary right such as hunting, drawing water, or enjoying a common.
The term appears in medieval and early common law sources primarily in the compound phrase accessus et recessus — the liberty of going onto and off another's land. This formulation captures the bilateral character of the right: the approach (accessus) and the departure (recessus) together constitute the complete servitude. Neither half was understood to stand alone.
A related but distinct pairing found in the same sources is ingressus et egressus, which described the same practical liberty when applied specifically to the exercise of rights of common — that is, the right to enter land to graze animals, cut wood, or take other profits of the soil. The two formulations were functionally parallel but terminologically distinct depending on the underlying right being served.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In the context of papal elections, accessus refers to the procedure by which a cardinal, after an inconclusive ballot, changes their vote to support another candidate — a mechanism for breaking a deadlock and reaching the two-thirds majority required to elect a pope.
Historical common usage: Not recorded in Webster's 1913 as an English word; the term remained Latin in ordinary usage and did not pass into standard English vocabulary.
Editorial note: The ecclesiastical meaning (a cardinal's accession to another's candidacy) and the land-law meaning share the same Latin root — the idea of "going toward" or "drawing closer to" something — but they describe entirely different legal contexts. A researcher encountering accessus in a canonical or church history source is reading about conclave procedure, not property rights. The two usages do not overlap.
Why It Matters in Research
Accessus is a term of medieval and early modern English land law and will appear almost exclusively in sources from that period — Bracton, Fleta, and commentaries drawing on them. Researchers working in post-seventeenth-century materials are unlikely to encounter it in active use; by that point, the underlying concepts had been absorbed into the broader vocabulary of easements, profits à prendre, and rights of common, and the Latin terminology had largely fallen away from practical legal writing.
The key research trap is the pairing problem. Accessus rarely appears alone in the sources; it is nearly always coupled with recessus, forming the bilateral expression accessus et recessus. A researcher who encounters either term in isolation should look immediately for the companion term and treat the pair as a unit. Similarly, the near-synonym pairing ingressus et egressus appears in the same sources with the same functional meaning, but attached to a different doctrinal context (rights of common rather than hunting and water rights). Confusing the two pairings can mislead a researcher about which underlying right is being described.
Bracton (fol. 231b–232) and Fleta (lib. 4, c. 27, §1) are the primary sources Burrill cites. Both are available in scholarly editions, and researchers should go directly to those passages rather than relying on secondary glosses, which sometimes flatten the distinction between accessus et recessus and ingressus et egressus.
The term also has a live meaning in canon law and papal election procedure (see Common Language above), which creates an additional cross-context confusion risk for researchers working in ecclesiastical history or canon law sources alongside common law materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive legal dictionary treatment among the Law Mind shelf sources. Burrill correctly situates accessus in old English law, defines it accurately as access and ingress, and cites Bracton and Fleta directly — both genuine medieval sources, and the appropriate primary authorities for the term.
Burrill's entry is useful but truncated; it breaks off mid-sentence in its discussion of ingressus et egressus. The full context, recoverable from Bracton and Fleta directly, makes clear that the distinction between the two pairings was doctrinal, not merely stylistic.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus indexes accessus as a primary entry, which reflects how thoroughly the term retreated from active legal vocabulary as English land law developed its own idiom for servitudes and common rights. Later dictionaries treat the underlying concepts — rights of common, profits à prendre, easements — under English headings without preserving the Latin pairing.
Jurisdictional Note
Accessus as a term of art is specific to English common law in its medieval and early modern form. It does not appear as operative legal vocabulary in American common law sources, which inherited the underlying concepts through the easement and profits-à-prendre framework without retaining the Latin terminology.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Easements and Servitudes
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Rights
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Papal Elections and Canon Law (for the ecclesiastical usage)