BUTTS

Definition

In old English land law, butts are the short strips or pieces of arable land left unplowed at the ends of fields, where the plow was turned around during cultivation. Because a plow team could not easily turn within the field itself, these end strips were necessarily left unworked and formed a distinct feature of the open-field system of medieval English agriculture. The term also designated, in a separate but related sense, the boundary lines running across the ends of a parcel — as distinguished from the side boundaries. In this surveying usage, butts are the terminal lines of a plot, while bounds (or "sidings") are the lateral lines. The full phrase "butts and bounds" describes a complete boundary description: the end lines and the side lines together, forming a closed survey of a piece of land. A third, less prominent legal usage identifies butts as places where archers assembled to practice shooting at a mark — a sense that appears in Black's but carries no significant property law weight.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "butt," with no land-measurement sense in modern ordinary speech. Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Butt" could mean the thicker end of something, a cask of a standard size, or a target for archery — the last sense surviving into legal use. The gap between common and legal meaning is significant for historical research. A modern reader encountering "butts" in an old conveyance or survey document will find no useful guidance from contemporary English. The land-measurement and boundary-description senses are entirely obsolete in ordinary usage and appear almost exclusively in medieval English land records, field surveys, and early American conveyancing instruments that borrowed English surveying language.

Common Confusion

Butts vs. Bounds: In the compound phrase "butts and bounds," each word carries a distinct directional meaning. Butts are the end lines (the short sides of a rectangular or strip plot); bounds are the lateral or side lines. Researchers sometimes treat the phrase as a redundant doublet — two words meaning the same thing — when in fact the pairing is technically precise. Collapsing the distinction obscures the orientation of a plot's boundaries. Butts vs. Headlands: Headlands are the same unplowed end strips described from the perspective of the farmer turning the plow; butts describe the same feature from the perspective of the surveyor or conveyancer marking boundaries. Both terms appear in old English agricultural and legal writing to describe identical ground, and the two are often used interchangeably in sources, which can mislead a researcher into thinking they are distinct features.

Why It Matters in Research

Researchers working with medieval English land records, early colonial American deeds, or any instrument using the phrase "butts and bounds" need to recognize that butts is a technical surveying term, not decoration. Its presence in a deed signals that the drafter was following the English convention of describing terminal boundaries separately from lateral boundaries — a convention with roots in the open-field strip system of medieval agriculture. The term nearly disappears from legal instruments after the enclosure movement transformed English landholding patterns and after American conveyancing shifted toward metes-and-bounds descriptions that do not distinguish end lines from side lines by separate vocabulary. Encountering "butts" in a post-enclosure or modern document is unusual and may indicate copying from an older form or deliberate archaism. The archery sense of butts — a shooting range or target area — occasionally surfaces in municipal records, parish records, and statutes regulating archery practice (English law historically required maintenance of archery butts). Researchers in local history or early municipal law should be alert to this distinct usage appearing alongside the land-measurement sense in the same period sources.

Historical Dictionary Support

The four source dictionaries agree on the core land-measurement definition: short unplowed strips at the ends of fields where the plow turned. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's treat this as the primary definition. Burrill adds the most useful detail, explaining the directional distinction between butts (ends) and bounds or sidelings (sides), and notes the Latin and French roots of the term — information that helps confirm the word's technical rather than colloquial status in old instruments. Bouvier's is the most spare, citing Cowell's legal dictionary without elaboration. Black's adds the archery-range sense that the other dictionaries omit or subordinate. None of the historical dictionaries fully develops the surveying implication of butts as a term of art within the "butts and bounds" formula, which is where the term has its greatest practical significance for deed research. Researchers relying solely on these entries may underestimate the term's role in boundary description methodology.

Jurisdictional Note

The land-measurement sense of butts is primarily English in origin and appears most commonly in English medieval records and early American colonial deeds from jurisdictions that adopted English surveying conventions. It is not a feature of civil law or Spanish land grant traditions, so researchers working in Louisiana, Florida, or the American Southwest will rarely encounter it in that sense.

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