Definition
Detenue is a Law French term meaning detention or the act of detaining. It refers specifically to the wrongful holding or keeping of another person's personal property — the detention component of what the common law formalized as the action of detinue. The term appears in early legal texts to describe one of the two operative elements of that action: the taking and the holding of goods belonging to another.
The term itself is not a cause of action but a descriptive element — the continued withholding of chattels after a demand for their return. Where a wrongful taking (prise) initiates the wrong, the detenue is the ongoing refusal or failure to surrender the property.
Common Confusion
Detenue and detinue are easily conflated, and many researchers encounter detenue only as a passing reference in older texts without realizing it is the source word for the cause of action. Detenue names the act or condition of detention; detinue names the legal remedy built around that condition. The distinction matters in historical research because a source may use detenue descriptively — to characterize what a defendant is doing — without invoking the formal writ. Similarly, detenue should not be confused with detainer, which developed into a distinct body of law governing unlawful holding of real property and, later, criminal custody holds.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early common law pleading records, Year Books, or Britton will encounter detenue as part of formulaic language — most characteristically in the paired phrase en la prise et en la detenue, in the taking and in the detention. Recognizing this phrase as foundational pleading language for the action of detinue prevents misreading it as mere narrative description.
The term virtually disappears from American legal sources after the early nineteenth century. By the time American law dictionaries were being compiled in the mid-to-late 1800s, detinue had fully absorbed detenue's conceptual function, and the French source word was retained only as a historical gloss. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should expect to find detenue almost exclusively in sources drawing on Britton, Bracton, or early English plea rolls — not in American case reporters or statutory materials.
One practical trap: OCR and transcription errors in historical sources sometimes render detenue as detinue or vice versa, and the reverse also occurs. When the legal context calls for a descriptive characterization of ongoing wrongful holding rather than a named writ or cause of action, detenue is likely the correct reading.
The term also marks an important boundary in the evolution of personal property remedies. Detinue — built on the concept of detenue — was one of the earliest common law actions for recovery of specific chattels, and tracing its conceptual lineage through the French term helps researchers understand how English law distinguished between recovering the thing itself versus recovering damages for its loss.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential entry: "L. Fr. Detention. En la prise et en la detenue; in the taking and in the detention. Britt. c. 27. Hence the name of the action of detinue." This is economical but accurate. Burrill correctly traces detenue directly to Britton and correctly identifies it as the etymological and conceptual root of detinue. The entry does not, however, explain the distinction between the two elements — prise and detenue — or why the action of detinue came to be named for the detention rather than the taking. That omission reflects the dictionary's assumption of reader familiarity with early pleading forms.
Other historical dictionaries in the common law tradition, including Tomlin and Jacob, treat detinue at length but generally skip detenue as a separate entry, folding its meaning into the discussion of the action. Burrill's decision to give it a standalone entry, however brief, is a marker of his attention to Law French source vocabulary — a useful reminder that the Law Mind corpus's historical dictionaries differ in their lexicographic scope and that absence from one source does not mean absence from the law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: DETINUE — for the full development of the common law action, its elements, and its displacement by conversion and replevin in modern practice.