Definition
A species of yearly rents issuing out of certain lands and payable to certain monasteries. Annonz civiles were a form of annual charge on land — a perpetual or recurring obligation tied to specific parcels — the proceeds of which flowed to religious houses. The term belongs to the vocabulary of medieval ecclesiastical land tenure and is encountered almost exclusively in historical legal sources dealing with English or continental monastic property rights.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are unlikely to encounter this term in modern legal contexts. Its practical relevance lies entirely in historical research involving monastic land holdings, dissolution-era records, or disputes over ancient charges on land surviving into post-Reformation conveyancing.
Several navigational points deserve attention. First, the term is closely bound to the institutional history of monasteries as landholders. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England (1530s–1540s), rights and obligations of this kind were frequently transferred to the Crown or to private grantees, and documentary traces appear in state papers, patent rolls, and conveyancing records of the Tudor period. Researchers working in those records may find the term used without explanation, as scribes assumed familiarity.
Second, the Latin form annonz (a contracted or variant spelling of annona, meaning grain or yearly produce) signals that these rents may originally have been rendered in kind — grain or agricultural produce — rather than money. By the time the term reached English legal dictionaries, the economic character had likely shifted toward monetary equivalents, but source documents may describe the obligation in its original form.
Third, researchers should be alert to the fragmentation of such charges across different record types. A single parcel of land might appear in monastic cartularies, later in Crown surveys, and ultimately in private title abstracts — each record using different terminology for what may be the same underlying obligation.
Finally, this term sits within a broader cluster of archaic rent-charge and ecclesiastical property concepts. Researchers who need to trace a charge of this kind through a chain of title will likely need to move across several related entries and consult historical treatises on copyhold, mortmain, and ecclesiastical tenure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only available definition in the Law Mind corpus: "A species of yearly rents issuing out of certain lands, and payable to certain monasteries." The entry is brief and descriptive, offering no further elaboration on the legal mechanism, the manner of enforcement, or the historical period in which the term was operative.
The definition is accurate as far as it goes but leaves significant gaps. It does not indicate whether the obligation ran with the land as a real burden, whether it was enforceable in the ecclesiastical or temporal courts, or how disputes over nonpayment were resolved. Historical dictionaries generally treated this term as archaic even at the time of their compilation, which explains the sparse treatment. Researchers requiring depth will need to look beyond Black's to monastic records, treatises on ecclesiastical law, and histories of land tenure.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is a creature of English and continental ecclesiastical land law and has no operative meaning in modern common law jurisdictions. Its relevance is confined to historical English legal research, particularly records predating or documenting the aftermath of the Tudor Dissolution of the Monasteries.