Definition
An archaic term from old English land records denoting small pieces or strips of ground located at the heads, or end-portions, of plowed fields. Chevitiz refers to the irregular or marginal parcels of land that remained at the terminal boundaries of cultivated strips, typically arising from the geometry of open-field plowing systems.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering chevitiz will find it almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English land records — surveys, extents, court rolls, and manorial documents — where granular descriptions of agricultural parcels were essential to establishing tenure and customary rights. The term carries no continuing life in modern law and will not appear in post-enclosure land documentation.
The principal research trap is misidentification: chevitiz can be mistaken for a proper name, a place name, or a corrupted rendering of another term when encountered in manuscript sources. Its Latin or Law French flavor may lead researchers to pursue the wrong etymological thread. Recognizing it as a term of agricultural land description — specifically tied to open-field strip cultivation — is the key to unlocking the surrounding documentary context.
Corpus connections worth noting: chevitiz will cluster with other manorial and agrarian terms such as selion, headland, gore, and butt. A document using chevitiz is almost certainly describing land held in common-field tenure, which carries its own body of customary law governing use rights, stinting, and enclosure. Researchers should approach such records with the agrarian legal framework of the manor in view, not the framework of freehold or fee simple conveyancing.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only dictionary entry recovered for this term, defining it tersely as "pieces of ground, or heads at the end of plowed lands," with attribution to Cowell. John Cowell's Interpreter (1607) was a primary reference work for archaic legal and documentary terms, and this chain of attribution — Black's citing Cowell — is characteristic of how Black's preserved terms that had fallen entirely out of active legal use by the nineteenth century. The definition is reliable as far as it goes but offers no further elaboration on the legal significance of such parcels, the tenure systems in which they arose, or the rights that might attach to them. No other historical dictionaries in the source set treat the term. Researchers should treat Black's entry as a signpost rather than a complete account, and should consult specialized glossaries of manorial and agrarian terminology for fuller context.