Definition
Lawful; permissible; allowable. In old English law, an act done with legal right or proper authority — one that may be performed without legal wrong. Most commonly used in the context of entry upon land: an entry is congeable when the person entering has a legal right to do so. Conversely, an entry "not congeable" describes an unlawful intrusion that could constitute disseisin.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Lawful; done with permission from authority.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Permissible; done lawfully; as, entry congeable.
Editorial note: Unusually for a Law French survival, the common and legal meanings are nearly identical here. The term is nonetheless a research artifact — it appears almost exclusively in legal and quasi-legal historical writing, and any encounter with it in ordinary text almost certainly signals a legal document or legal commentary rather than common speech.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of historical technical art, not modern doctrine. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English common law materials — treatises, year books, abridgments, and early American opinions citing those sources. It does not appear in modern statutory or case law in active use.
The primary research trap is mistaking "congeable" for a synonym of a modern concept like "permissive" or "licensed" without appreciating its specific technical context: the law of entry upon land, disseisin, and the medieval rules governing when a disseisee could lawfully retake possession. The term tracks directly onto the old learning about continual claim — a disseisee who maintained his claim by regular formal assertion kept his entry congeable and did not lose his right of re-entry.
Researchers using Law Mind corpus materials from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries should understand the term as a signal that the surrounding text concerns real property rights of entry, the law of disseisin, or the older doctrinal framework that preceded modern ejectment and adverse possession analysis. An entry "not congeable" in Littleton or Coke is functionally a description of trespass by one having no right — the conceptual ancestor of later wrongful entry doctrine.
The term also occasionally appears in close proximity to discussions of forcible entry statutes, where the question of whether an entry was congeable bore on criminal as well as civil liability. Corpus researchers should follow those threads into early English statutes on forcible entry (beginning in the reign of Richard II) and their American colonial reception.
Burrill notes the term was introduced into the common law literature during the reign of Edward III, which anchors it to the mid-fourteenth century consolidation of real property doctrine. This dating is useful for researchers trying to distinguish early medieval land law from the somewhat more rationalized Edwardian period.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are consistent in core meaning: congeable means lawful or done with legal leave, derived from the Law French congé (leave, permission), itself traceable to the Latin commeatus. All sources anchor the term in Littleton's Tenures, section 279, as the canonical illustration — the disseisin passage describing entry "where his entry is not congeable."
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the fullest etymological context, tracing congé through Old French to Latin. Burrill adds the doctrinal gloss that is most useful for researchers: the connection to continual claim, the mechanism by which a disseisee preserved his congeable entry over time, and the Edward III dating. Anderson's entry is brief but illustrates the adverbial form — "congeably" — in a quotation showing active use in possessory reasoning: "If his entry were congeable, it will be considered as limited by his right."
What the historical dictionaries collectively do not provide is any guidance on the term's disappearance from active legal vocabulary. It fades from use as the old forms of real action were abolished and ejectment became the standard possessory remedy — a doctrinal transformation roughly complete in England by the early nineteenth century and in most American jurisdictions by mid-century. No historical dictionary entry flags this obsolescence explicitly, which can mislead a researcher into treating the term as having live modern application.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Congeable is a term of English common law with no distinct American jurisdictional variation. Early American cases citing Littleton and Coke occasionally use it, but no American jurisdiction developed independent doctrine around it. Its appearance in American materials reflects reception of English common law learning rather than indigenous legal development.
---