Definition
Egality is an archaic legal term meaning equality — specifically, equality of condition, value, or share in the context of a legal transaction or division. In historical property law, egality referred to the state of equal partition or equivalent value achieved between parties, particularly in the division of land or the equalization of unequal shares. It is not a term of active modern legal use; it survives principally as a period label in historical texts and as a cross-reference pointing toward the related doctrine of owelty.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Equality.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Equality. (Cited to Chaucer and Tennyson, indicating long use in literary and general English.)
The gap between common and legal usage is narrow in substance — both point to equality — but the legal context is specific. In common English, egality is simply a synonym for equality in an abstract or philosophical sense. In legal usage, egality carried a precise transactional meaning: the achievement of equivalent value between parties in a partition or exchange, the condition that owelty payments were designed to produce. A researcher encountering "egality" in an old conveyancing or partition record is not reading a philosophical statement; the term signals a formal legal condition with property consequences.
---
Common Confusion
Egality and equality are functionally synonymous in ordinary language, but in legal sources egality is almost exclusively a property law term connected to partition and exchange. Researchers should not treat the word as mere rhetorical flourish when it appears in deeds, court records, or treatises from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. More importantly, egality is closely bound to owelty: owelty is the money payment made to achieve egality when an equal partition of land cannot be accomplished in kind. Confusing the two inverts cause and effect — egality is the condition sought; owelty is the legal mechanism for reaching it.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Egality is a low-frequency term that appears almost exclusively in historical property law sources, particularly in English and early American partition and exchange cases. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note two traps.
First, both editions of Black's Law Dictionary define egality by cross-reference only — directing the reader to owelty — without providing an independent substantive definition. This means that corpus searches on "egality" alone will underperform: the substantive doctrine lives under owelty, and a researcher who stops at egality will miss the body of case law and treatise commentary.
Second, the term largely disappears from American legal usage after the nineteenth century. Modern partition statutes and judicial opinions accomplish the same result without using the word. A researcher reading pre-Civil War equity opinions or colonial land records may encounter egality where a modern court would simply say "equalization" or reference an owelty payment. Temporal awareness is essential: finding egality in a twentieth-century document would be unusual enough to warrant scrutiny of the source.
The Coke reference in both Black's editions (Co. Litt. 169a) is the anchoring authority. Researchers tracing the historical doctrine should look there first, then follow the owelty line of cases.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary treat egality identically: each defines it by a single cross-reference to owelty, with a citation to Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 169a). Neither edition offers an independent definition or any explanatory text. This is unusual economy even for Black's and signals that the editors regarded egality as fully subsumed within the owelty doctrine rather than as an independent concept requiring separate treatment.
The Webster's 1913 entry confirms that egality had a recognized general-English life, citing Chaucer and Tennyson — literary uses far removed from conveyancing. The legal dictionaries, by contrast, imported the word into a narrow technical function. No meaningful divergence exists between the two Black's editions on this term; the second edition reproduces the substance of the first without elaboration.
What historical sources miss: neither edition explains why egality warranted its own entry if the entire definition is a cross-reference. The likely answer is that the word appeared in enough period legal writing — particularly in editions of Coke and in English equity reports — that a practitioner or scholar encountering it needed to know where to look. The entry functions as a finding aid rather than a substantive definition.
---
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Owelty; Partition of Property.
---