Definition
Corporeal hereditaments are tangible, physical things capable of being inherited — essentially, land and everything permanently attached to or forming part of it. The term comes from the classical English property law division of hereditaments into two categories: those perceptible by the senses (corporeal) and those existing only as legal rights (incorporeal). Corporeal hereditaments are the physical side of that pair: the soil, buildings, minerals, trees, and other substantial, permanent objects that pass with a freehold estate.
In modern usage, the practical content of "corporeal hereditaments" is almost entirely subsumed by the term "real property" or "land." The distinction retains relevance primarily in reading older deeds, conveyances, and statutes that employ the classical terminology.
Common Confusion
CORPOREAL HEREDITAMENTS vs. INCORPOREAL HEREDITAMENTS: These two terms are mirror concepts and are frequently encountered together. Incorporeal hereditaments are rights in or over land — easements, profits à prendre, rents, advowsons — that have no physical substance themselves but are nonetheless inheritable. The confusion arises because both categories are hereditaments (capable of descending by inheritance) and both attach to land, yet only corporeal hereditaments are the land itself or things forming physical part of it. A right-of-way across a parcel is incorporeal; the parcel itself is corporeal.
CORPOREAL HEREDITAMENTS vs. REAL PROPERTY: Modern real property law absorbs corporeal hereditaments entirely. The terms are functionally synonymous for most research purposes, but they are not interchangeable in historical sources. Older instruments may distinguish among types of real interests using the hereditaments framework where modern sources use "real property" as an undifferentiated category.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational challenge precisely because it sounds archaic but appears with regularity in pre-twentieth-century deeds, conveyancing forms, wills, and statutes. A researcher reading a nineteenth-century grant of "all corporeal hereditaments" needs to understand that the grantor meant physical land and its permanent appurtenances — not rights, rents, or other intangible interests.
Several traps exist in the historical corpus:
First, the boundary between corporeal and incorporeal was not always drawn consistently. Standing timber, minerals in place, and fixtures generated persistent classification disputes. Some authorities treated mineral rights as incorporeal once severed from the surface; others classified them as corporeal until extraction. Context and jurisdiction matter.
Second, English sources (Blackstone, Stephen's Commentaries, Kent's Commentaries) are the dominant authorities in the historical dictionary record, and their framework maps imperfectly onto American property law development. American courts adopted the vocabulary but did not always apply the English doctrinal distinctions with the same precision.
Third, the term appears in conveyancing boilerplate long after it ceased to carry distinct analytical weight. A clause reciting "lands, tenements, and corporeal hereditaments" in an 1890 deed is likely formulaic rather than substantive — the grantor's lawyer was using settled language, not drawing a careful distinction.
For corpus researchers, the most productive connections run toward hereditaments as a parent concept, toward real property and land for modern-law parallel research, and toward incorporeal hereditaments when working through any historical source that uses the corporeal/incorporeal division as a structuring framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Burrill are in close agreement, both tracing directly to Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Com. 17–18). Burrill's entry is the more complete of the two, adding Stephen's Commentaries and Kent's Commentaries as confirming authorities and preserving Blackstone's essential formulation: hereditaments "of a material and tangible nature, and may be perceived by the senses, consisting wholly of substantial and permanent objects."
Both sources anchor the definition in the term "land" as its practical summary — meaning that, for classical English property law, "land" was understood to comprehend all corporeal hereditaments. This reflects Blackstone's broad construction of "land" as including not only the soil surface but everything above and below it that is physically part of the estate.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the classification problems generated by severed mineral estates, fixtures disputes, and the treatment of growing crops (emblements). These were live doctrinal questions in the period when the term was in active use, and researchers working with case law rather than dictionary definitions will need to pursue those threads through the case reports rather than the lexicographic sources.
Jurisdictional Note
The corporeal/incorporeal hereditaments distinction is rooted in English common law and was imported wholesale into American property law. Its practical force diminished at different rates across American jurisdictions as statutory property codes modernized the vocabulary. In jurisdictions that enacted early comprehensive property statutes (notably California's 1872 Civil Code), the hereditaments framework was largely displaced by statutory categories earlier than in states relying primarily on common law development.