Definition
In old French and feudal law, a dove-cot or pigeon-house. The colombier was a structure maintained on a lord's estate for the keeping of doves or pigeons, and it carried legal significance as a manorial privilege — the right to maintain one was not freely available to all landholders but was typically reserved to the lord of the manor or attached to a specific feudal tenure.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Colombier as a place name — several French villages carry the name.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A large size of paper used for drawings.
Neither common usage has any connection to the legal meaning. The place-name usage is incidental; the paper-size usage (a large format sheet, named presumably from the watermark of a dove) is a separate derivation entirely. Researchers should not allow either common usage to create false associations when encountering this term in legal or feudal documents.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in feudal and manorial law contexts. Researchers encountering colombier in historical documents — particularly surveys of Norman or French-influenced manorial estates, or texts dealing with seigneurial rights — should understand it as a marker of lordship and privilege, not merely an architectural feature. The right to maintain a colombier (or dovecote, in English) was a recognized incident of lordship in French feudal practice, and disputes over that right could touch on questions of tenure, customary privilege, and seigneurial jurisdiction.
The term surfaces in sources dealing with the feudal incidents of French and continental European law. English legal sources treat the equivalent structure under the term "dovecote" or "dove-house," so researchers moving between English and French feudal materials should note the terminological divide. Burrill's citation to Feod. ch. 21 points toward feudal treatise literature as the primary home of this term; it will not appear in most common law digests or English case law under this spelling.
Because the colombier represented a privilege attached to land, it may appear alongside other manorial rights — such as mill rights, warren rights, and fishing rights — when researching the content of feudal tenures or the incidents of seigneurial estates in French legal history or in jurisdictions with French legal heritage (notably Louisiana and Quebec).
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides a compact but sufficient entry: "In a dove-cot or pigeon-house," with a citation to feudal treatise authority (Feod. ch. 21). The entry is characteristically terse, as Burrill's treatment of French feudal vocabulary tends to be. The term is presented as French (marked "Fr."), situating it firmly in the continental feudal law tradition rather than in English common law.
No other major English-language legal dictionaries — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Jacob's — carry this term with any prominence, reflecting its specialized and geographically bounded application. Historical sources derived from French feudal practice or from Louisiana and Quebec legal materials would be the natural place to seek further elaboration. The term's absence from most English legal dictionaries is itself informative: it signals that the concept, while legally real and significant in French feudal law, was absorbed into English practice under different vocabulary (dovecote, dove-house) and was never naturalized as a term of art in common law jurisdictions.