Definition
Decories is an obsolete Law French term carrying two related but distinct senses recorded in historical legal usage: (1) skinned or pulled off, referring to the stripping or removal of a surface layer; and (2) the receding of the sea from the land, describing the gradual withdrawal of tidal or coastal waters to expose dry ground. In its second and more legally consequential sense, decories is functionally synonymous with reliction — the process by which land is uncovered as water permanently retreats. The term does not appear in modern legal usage and survives only in historical treatises and early English common law sources concerning riparian and coastal land rights.
Common Confusion
Decories and reliction describe the same natural phenomenon but operate differently in legal discourse. Reliction is the term of art that carried forward into modern property law; decories did not. A researcher encountering decories in a historical source should treat it as a period-specific synonym for reliction rather than a distinct legal doctrine. The physical image embedded in the first sense — skinning or peeling off — likely gave rise to the second, describing the sea as pulling back from the land as skin peels from a surface, but the two senses should not be treated as separate legal concepts requiring separate analysis.
Why It Matters in Research
Decories is a term a researcher will encounter only in pre-modern English legal texts, particularly those dealing with sewers, coastal drainage, tidal lands, and the Crown's rights over foreshore. Its appearance in Callis on Sewers — a seventeenth-century treatise on the law of sewers and drainage commissions — places it squarely in the literature governing riparian administration and coastal land management under early English law.
The primary research trap is treating decories as a standalone doctrine. It is not. When encountered in a source, it is a signal to cross-reference reliction and to examine the surrounding context for questions of land title: specifically, who acquires title to land uncovered when the sea retreats. Under classical common law principles, gradual and imperceptible recession of the sea (reliction) vested the newly exposed land in the adjacent riparian owner, while sudden or perceptible changes did not carry the same title consequences. Decories appears in sources that predate the consolidation of this doctrine, so researchers should be cautious about reading later reliction rules backward onto passages using this term.
Researchers working on historical questions of Crown foreshore rights, tidal land grants, or drainage commission jurisdiction in English legal history will find decories appearing as an incidental descriptive term rather than a term of art with its own body of doctrine. It does not generate its own case law. Follow the term to reliction for the operative legal framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal historical source for this term in the Anglo-American legal dictionary tradition. Burrill defines decories with characteristic concision — noting both the physical sense (skinned, pulled off, from Kelham's glossary of Law French) and the legal-descriptive sense (receding of the sea from the land), with a cross-reference to Callis on Sewers. The entry is brief and treats the term as a piece of vocabulary requiring identification rather than a concept requiring elaboration, which is consistent with its status as a descriptive term rather than a doctrinal one.
No entry for decories appears in Black's Law Dictionary across its major editions, nor in Bouvier's Law Dictionary, suggesting that the term was regarded even by the nineteenth century as sufficiently archaic that it required only preservation in specialist glossaries rather than active definition in general legal dictionaries. This silence in the broader dictionary tradition confirms that decories did not migrate into American legal usage.
Kelham's glossary of Norman and Old French — cited by Burrill — is the philological anchor for the "skinned/pulled off" sense, grounding the term in the Law French vocabulary that permeated early English legal writing. Researchers consulting Kelham will find the term in its purely linguistic context; Callis provides the legal-operational context.
Jurisdictional Note
Decories is exclusively a term of early English law. It has no recognized application in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Researchers working in American property law should proceed directly to reliction.