Definition
Drottural is an adjective in historical common law describing an action or remedy that concerns the right of property itself, as distinguished from the right of possession. A drottural action is one in which the plaintiff seeks to establish and recover the underlying title or ownership of real property, not merely to regain physical control of it.
In the classical common law scheme of real actions, real actions were divided into two categories: drottural and possessory. A possessory action sought restoration of seisin — the actual possession of land — and was available where the plaintiff had been dispossessed within a defined time period. A drottural action, by contrast, reached back to the root of title and sought to vindicate the fundamental right of property regardless of when dispossession occurred. The Writ of Right was the paradigmatic drottural action.
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Common Confusion
Drottural is easily conflated with possessory in sources that use the terms loosely. The distinction is not merely descriptive but was procedurally consequential in historical common law: drottural actions were more burdensome to the plaintiff (requiring proof of the original right, not just prior seisin), were subject to longer limitation periods, and carried different procedural rules including the grand assize. Researchers encountering references to "real actions" in historical sources should not assume all such actions were drottural — possessory real actions were far more common in practice.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century common law sources. Researchers will encounter drottural in treatises on the law of real property and real actions — principally in Bracton, Littleton, Coke, and Blackstone — and in digests treating the Writ of Right and related writs. By the mid-nineteenth century, the term had effectively passed out of active legal usage, abolished along with the bulk of the old real action system in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and the Common Law Procedure Act 1852, and in American jurisdictions by the progressive simplification of civil procedure culminating in code pleading and the Federal Rules.
When reading older case law, chancery proceedings, or property treatises, the drottural/possessory distinction signals which procedural track the action occupied. This matters because the remedies, time bars, and modes of trial differed substantially. A researcher confused about why one plaintiff succeeded on a possessory assize while another failed on a Writ of Right — or vice versa — may be missing the drottural/possessory framework entirely.
The term also surfaces in historical discussions of Indian land title, colonial-era land grants, and ecclesiastical property disputes, where the underlying right of property (rather than mere possession) remained at issue in contexts that did not fit neatly into possessory assize procedure.
Finch's Law, cited by Bouvier, refers to Sir Henry Finch's Law, or a Discourse Thereof (1627), an early systematic treatment of English common law that is part of the institutional writers tradition and can be consulted for fuller exposition of this classification.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the only substantial historical dictionary treatment of this term in the Law Mind corpus. Bouvier's entry is characteristically spare: it identifies drottural as relating to "right" rather than possession, pairs it with "possessory" as the two species of real actions, and cites Finch's Law at page 257. The cross-reference to the Writ of Right (which see) is Bouvier's signal that the fuller procedural context is there.
No entry for drottural appears in Black's earlier editions, and the term is absent from common legal glossaries of the American republic period, reflecting how thoroughly the old real action system had been displaced by that point. Researchers relying solely on American legal dictionaries will not find this term defined. English sources — particularly Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III, Chapter X, treating real actions) and Coke upon Littleton — provide the richer doctrinal background that Bouvier assumes the reader already possesses.
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Jurisdictional Note
The drottural/possessory distinction is a feature of English common law and those American jurisdictions that inherited it directly. It has no meaningful modern application in any U.S. jurisdiction. Researchers in Scottish, civilian, or ecclesiastical law contexts will encounter analogous but formally distinct categorizations of real rights.
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