Definition
Dignities are titles of honor recognized in English law as a species of incorporeal hereditament — that is, intangible property capable of inheritance. In the English feudal and common law tradition, dignities encompassed the ranks and titles of the nobility (dukedoms, earldoms, baronies, and the like), treated legally not merely as honorific labels but as heritable property interests descending according to fixed rules, often by special remainder or limitation rather than ordinary inheritance. The holder of a dignity enjoyed legal incidents attached to that status, including rights of precedence and, historically, privileges in Parliament and the courts.
The concept has no operative legal meaning in American law. The republican character of the United States government — reinforced by Article I, Section 9 of the federal Constitution, which prohibits the granting of titles of nobility — foreclosed any domestic reception of dignities as a legal institution.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "dignity" — states or qualities of being worthy of honor or respect; also, positions or ranks conferring honor.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Dignities" carried the sense of high offices, ranks, or titles that confer distinction, with explicit acknowledgment of ecclesiastical and civil degrees of honor.
The gap here is structural, not merely semantic. In ordinary English, dignities is simply an elevated plural noun. In English law, dignities is a technical property category — an incorporeal hereditament subject to conveyance, forfeiture, and hereditary succession by rules distinct from those governing land. A researcher who reads "dignities" in a historical English legal source as mere honorific language will miss the full property-law apparatus the word activates.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
English law recognized several grades of dignity tracking the peerage hierarchy: dukedoms, marquisates, earldoms, viscountcies, and baronies. Dignities could also be of an inferior or non-peerage character, including knighthoods and certain ecclesiastical dignities (deaneries, prebendaries, and the like). The rules of descent and remainder varied significantly across these categories, and the distinction between dignities descendible to heirs general versus heirs male was a persistent source of legal dispute.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English property law, feudal tenure, or the history of Parliament will encounter dignities treated as fully justiciable property. The House of Lords exercised jurisdiction over peerage claims — the mechanics of which were distinct from ordinary common law proceedings — and a substantial body of committee reports and peerage cases developed to adjudicate competing claims to dignities.
The primary research trap is anachronism in the other direction: American legal sources simply do not engage with dignities as a legal category, so researchers importing English doctrine should not assume American reception. Bouvier flags this cleanly. Constitutional historians researching the Titles of Nobility Clauses (Article I, §§ 9 and 10) will find dignities a useful background concept for understanding what the framers were prohibiting, even as American law never developed the category.
In corpus searches, "dignity" (singular) in American legal materials almost always appears in a different context — constitutional dignity jurisprudence, administrative law, or tort-adjacent contexts involving personal dignity interests. Do not conflate these uses with the property-law sense of "dignities" as hereditaments.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is characteristically terse: dignities are titles of honor, classified as incorporeal hereditaments, and inapplicable in the American republic. This is accurate as far as it goes. Bouvier correctly places dignities within the incorporeal hereditament taxonomy that English law inherited from Bracton and Blackstone — Blackstone's Commentaries (Book II) treats dignities alongside advowsons, tithes, and commons as species of intangible heritable property. Bouvier's note about the republican character of American government efficiently closes the subject for domestic practitioners, though it leaves the English framework largely unexplored for researchers who need it.
What Bouvier omits: the procedural complexity of peerage claims, the role of the Lord Chancellor and the Committee for Privileges, and the distinction between dignities held by tenure versus those granted by letters patent — all of which matter for anyone researching English legal history in depth.
Jurisdictional Note
Dignities as a property category are exclusively an English (and, by extension, British) legal institution. No American jurisdiction recognizes hereditary titles of honor as a legal category, and the constitutional prohibition makes the concept a historical artifact for domestic research purposes. Researchers working in Scottish law should note that Scots peerage law developed parallel but distinct rules for the inheritance of dignities.