Definition
An enclosure; a physical boundary or fence surrounding a piece of land. In early common law usage, clausure referred to the enclosed ground itself or the structure demarcating it — the material fact of a close being bounded and shut off from surrounding land. The term appears in Law French pleading in connection with actions involving enclosed parcels, where the existence and character of the enclosure was legally significant.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of shutting up or confining; confinement.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of shutting up or confining; confinement. [Rare.]
The common meaning treats clausure as an act or process — the shutting-in of something. The legal meaning, as used in Law French pleading contexts, shifts from the act to the physical structure or bounded space itself: not the shutting, but the enclosure that results. A researcher encountering the term in a legal source should read it as referring to the enclosed ground or its boundary, not to a process of confinement.
Why It Matters in Research
Clausure is a narrow, archaic Law French term with almost no footprint in modern legal writing. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in early Year Book materials, medieval and early modern English land law pleadings, or historical treatises on real property actions — particularly trespass quare clausum fregit (why he broke the close). In that context, clausure identifies the physical enclosure whose breach was the gravamen of the action.
The principal trap is the ordinary English meaning. Encountering clausure in a historical text and reading it as "confinement" or "closure" (in the modern procedural sense) will misread the passage. The legal sense is spatial and proprietary, not custodial or procedural.
Researchers working in Law Mind's historical real property corpus should also be alert to the overlap between clausure and related terms — close, enclosure, severalty — which may appear in the same sources with overlapping but technically distinct meanings. Burrill supplies only one illustrative Year Book passage; the term is not extensively defined even in historical dictionaries, which suggests it functioned more as descriptive pleading vocabulary than as a term of art requiring elaborate definition.
No meaningful jurisdictional variation applies: the term is effectively extinct in modern practice and confined to historical English common law sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only shelf source providing a direct entry. Burrill defines clausure simply as "an enclosure" with a single Year Book citation (P. 20 Hen. VI. 18), quoting the Law French: "Le clos est environ' ove un clausur'" — the close is surrounded with an enclosure. This confirms that clausure denoted the enclosing structure or bounded perimeter around a close, and that it appeared as a descriptive term in pleading rather than as a freestanding legal doctrine.
No other historical law dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus provide independent entries for this term. Its absence from later dictionaries is itself informative: the term likely fell out of active legal use as Law French declined and trespass pleadings shifted to English, with close and enclosure serving as functional replacements. Researchers should not expect doctrinal elaboration; the term is vocabulary, not a rule.