Definition
To manure or dress land with compost or dung. Compester is an archaic legal verb, drawn from Latin and Law Latin usage, appearing in early English property and agricultural law to describe the act of fertilizing or improving land through the application of manure or similar organic material. In its legal context, the term was relevant to questions of husbandry obligations, tenant duties, and the proper management of agricultural land held under lease or copyhold tenure.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current entry. The term is not in active use in modern English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. By the late nineteenth century the word had already passed out of common circulation.
The term survives only in archaic legal and agricultural texts. Unlike general English words for manuring or fertilizing land, compester carried specific legal weight in the context of tenant obligations and land management duties under English common law tenure arrangements.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in early English property law sources, particularly those dealing with agricultural tenancies, copyhold, and the duties owed by tenants to lords or landlords in maintaining the productive condition of land. Coke on Littleton, cited by Burrill, is the primary locus for the term in the English common law canon, and researchers should treat that source as the authoritative anchor.
The practical significance of compester lay in the broader legal principle that a tenant was obligated to manage leased land in a husbandlike manner — which included proper manuring and soil maintenance. Failure to do so could give rise to claims of waste or breach of covenant. Researchers working on waste doctrine, tenant obligations, or agricultural land use in historical English law should be alert to this term appearing in that context.
Because the term is largely confined to medieval and early modern English legal sources, it is unlikely to surface in American case law or statutes. Researchers working in American property law history may encounter it only when tracing the English common law roots of tenant duties or agricultural covenants. It does not appear in standard American legal dictionaries of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, which confirms its effective obsolescence outside of historical English sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole dictionary entry identified for this term. Burrill traces it to the Latin compostar and glosses it simply as "to manure," citing Coke on Littleton at folio 122a. The entry is minimal, reflecting the term's narrow and technical character even at the time of Burrill's compilation.
No entry appears in Black's Law Dictionary (any edition reviewed), Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Tomlin's Law Dictionary, suggesting that by the mid-nineteenth century the term had already receded from active legal usage and was recognized primarily as a historical artifact of agrarian English law. Burrill's inclusion of it reflects his broader commitment to preserving Law Latin and Anglo-Norman vocabulary that other contemporaneous dictionaries had already set aside.
The citation to Coke on Littleton is genuine and traceable. Researchers consulting that work in the relevant folio will find discussion of agricultural obligations and land management duties in the context of tenure law, which supplies the substantive legal background that Burrill's bare gloss does not provide.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is effectively confined to historical English common law. It has no known reception in American, Canadian, or other common law jurisdictions as a term of art, and should be treated as a historical English legal term for research purposes.