Definition
The act of removing a thing or person out of reach — placing it at such a distance that it cannot be recovered, seized, or brought before a court. In legal usage, eloignment refers specifically to the removal of property or a person to frustrate legal process, particularly the enforcement of a writ or judgment.
The term appears most frequently in the context of replevin. When a defendant, upon whom a writ of replevin has been served, removes or conceals the distrained goods so that the sheriff cannot execute the writ, that act constitutes eloignment. The consequence at common law was significant: the plaintiff in replevin could obtain a writ de proprietate probanda (or alternatively proceed to recover the full value of the goods) because the goods had been made unavailable through the defendant's own wrongful act.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The act of removing something to be put far away; withdrawal."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Removal to a distance; withdrawal. [Obs.]"
Both Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary mark the common English sense as obsolete or archaic, and both treat the term as a neutral description of physical removal. The legal meaning is not neutral: eloignment in law carries the specific sense of removal designed to defeat legal process, attaching procedural consequences — particularly in replevin — that do not follow from mere removal or withdrawal in the ordinary sense.
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Why It Matters in Research
Eloignment is a term deeply embedded in the common law of replevin and distress, and researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical materials. It is functionally extinct in modern American pleading but appears with some regularity in pre-twentieth-century case law, particularly in actions involving distraint of goods, landlord-tenant disputes, and early commercial litigation where replevin was a routine remedy.
The critical research trap is treating eloignment as a synonym for mere concealment or removal. At common law, the distinction mattered procedurally: eloignment triggered specific writs and altered the course of the replevin action. Courts sometimes drew lines between goods that were simply absent and goods that had been eloigned — the latter implying deliberate frustration of process.
Researchers working in state court records from the colonial period through the mid-nineteenth century should watch for eloignment as a pleaded fact in replevin declarations. It often signals that a plaintiff was attempting to convert a replevin action into one for the value of the goods rather than for the goods themselves — a meaningful strategic choice in an era when in-kind recovery was the default.
The Black's 2nd edition citation to Garneau v. Mill Co. (8 Wash. 467) is one of the few American appellate decisions that uses the term directly and is worth consulting for context on how late-nineteenth-century courts understood it.
Jurisdictional variation in replevin procedure affects how eloignment functioned in practice. Some states codified replevin with enough specificity to preserve the eloignment concept under new terminology; others absorbed it silently into broader provisions about unavailability of property.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement, which is itself informative: eloignment had a stable, narrow meaning in the common law tradition and did not generate the kind of definitional controversy that accompanies more contested terms.
Black's (both editions) and Burrill track nearly identically — "getting a thing or person out of the way; or removing it to a distance, so as to be out of reach" — language that captures both the physical act and the functional purpose (defeating reach or recovery). Rapalje & Lawrence is more compressed — "removal; sending to a distant place" — and strips out the purposive dimension, which is a notable omission given that intentional frustration of process is what gives the term its legal weight.
None of the historical dictionaries address eloignment of persons with any depth, though the definition formally includes it. The person-eloignment context — removing an individual to defeat habeas corpus or personal jurisdiction — is historically documented but rarely elaborated in these reference works. Researchers should not assume the term was limited to goods simply because the dictionaries illustrate it through property contexts.
Webster's 1913 marking the common English sense as obsolete confirms that by the late nineteenth century, eloignment had already retreated almost entirely into legal usage.
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Jurisdictional Note
Eloignment as a distinct legal concept is a product of English common law and was transplanted to American jurisdictions through reception of the common law. Its practical significance varies by state depending on how replevin was codified. In jurisdictions that preserved common law replevin forms closely, the concept retained operative meaning longer; in code pleading states, it was absorbed into more general statutory language about property unavailability.
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