Definition
To pasture cattle on land; to graze. In old English law, depasture described the act of putting or allowing livestock to feed upon a parcel of ground. The term appears most distinctly in property and land-use contexts, where the right to depasture — that is, the right to graze animals on another's land or on common land — was a recognized legal interest. It functioned both as a verb describing the act and, implicitly, as the basis for describing easements and profits appurtenant to land use.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To eat up, consume, or strip; alternatively, to feed or pasture; to graze.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To pasture; to feed; to graze; also, to use for pasture. Webster's illustrates the term with references to grazing cattle in grounds and to a right to depasture land alongside timber rights.
The common and legal meanings are close but not identical in emphasis. Ordinary usage centers on the physical act of grazing. The legal usage extends to the right or entitlement to graze — a distinction that matters when analyzing whether a document creates a mere license, a profit à prendre, or a covenant running with the land. A researcher seeing depasture in a conveyance or pleading should ask not only what act is described but what legal interest the act implies.
Common Confusion
Depasture is sometimes conflated loosely with common of pasture and with profit à prendre. These are related but distinct. Common of pasture is the right shared among defined persons to graze on common land. A profit à prendre is the broader category of right to take something (including herbage) from another's land. Depasture describes the act or its authorization; it does not itself name the legal category of the right involved. Historical sources use the word interchangeably in both factual and rights-based contexts, which can obscure which legal relationship a document is actually establishing.
Why It Matters in Research
Depasture is archaic vocabulary and will appear almost exclusively in older English sources — colonial American land grants, early common law pleadings, conveyancing instruments, and English agrarian law materials. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should treat it as a signal term for land-use rights analysis, particularly disputes involving commons, manorial grants, and early American property arrangements that imported English grazing-right concepts.
The term is not in active modern legal use. A researcher encountering it in a 19th-century American deed or case will need to translate it into the contemporary framework of easements and profits to understand how a court would analyze the underlying right today. The gap between the old vocabulary and the modern doctrinal category is the primary research trap.
Because depasture appears in pleadings as well as conveyances, context determines meaning: in a trespass action, it describes the wrongful act of grazing; in a conveyance, it may evidence the grant of a grazing right. These are legally different situations requiring different lines of research.
The single illustrative quotation — "if a man depastures unprofitable cattle in his ground" — appears identically across all three source dictionaries and derives from Bunbury's Reports (Bunb. 1, case 1), an early 18th-century English exchequer reporter. Its repetition without elaboration across sources signals that the term was already becoming archaic by the time these dictionaries were compiled.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: all three define depasture identically as "in old English law, to pasture," and all three use the identical Bunbury quotation. There is no divergence, elaboration, or evolution across the sources. This uniformity suggests the editors regarded the term as fixed and historical rather than living doctrine requiring interpretation.
Notably, none of the three sources addresses the rights dimension — that is, none explains the legal consequences of depasturing cattle on another's land without right, or how a depasturing right was created or transferred. Webster's 1913 is actually more useful on this point, citing Washburn's treatise on real property for the proposition that a right to depasture land could exist alongside a right to cut wood — pointing toward profit à prendre analysis. Researchers should supplement the dictionary sources with Washburn on easements and profits for substantive doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is rooted in English common law and is most likely to appear in materials from jurisdictions with strong English common law inheritance — England, the eastern American states, and early colonial grants. Western American jurisdictions developed grazing rights through different doctrinal channels (range law, federal land law, prior appropriation analogies) and are unlikely to use this vocabulary.