Definition
A valley or piece of low ground situated between two hills. The term appears in historical English legal contexts as a descriptive geographical designation used to identify and bound parcels of land in conveyances, surveys, and related instruments.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in older English legal records — land grants, surveys, boundary descriptions, and conveyancing instruments from the medieval and early modern periods. Its practical significance lies in its role as a locational descriptor: when a deed or grant references a combaterre, it is defining the physical character of land being conveyed, not invoking a legal doctrine. Misreading it as a term of art with legal consequences would be an error; it functions the way terms like "common," "moor," or "fen" function in boundary descriptions — as topographical shorthand.
Researchers working with early English land records should be alert to the fact that such Latin-derived geographical terms were used inconsistently across regions and time periods. What one scrivener called a combaterre, another might have described simply as a valley (vallis) or hollow. Cross-referencing Kennett's Glossary — cited as the authority in Black's — is advisable when precision matters, as Black's entry is itself a one-line relay of that source. There is no known judicial construction of this term in reported case law, and it does not appear to have generated litigation over its meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the only historical legal dictionary entry identified for this term, and it is notably thin: a single sentence citing Kennett's Parochial Antiquities (the "Gloss." reference). That work by White Kennett (1660–1728) was a glossary of obscure Anglo-Saxon and Latin terms encountered in old English ecclesiastical and legal records — a philological rather than a doctrinal source.
The entry's brevity reflects the term's status: it was included in Black's not because it had a contested legal meaning, but because a practitioner or researcher encountering it in an old document might not recognize it at all. It belongs to a category of entries in early editions of Black's that serve more as a glossary of archaic Latin vocabulary than as definitions of operative legal concepts. No subsequent edition of Black's appears to have expanded the definition. Researchers should treat the Kennett attribution as the beginning and end of the available historical authority on this term.