Definition
An archaic Law French form of ESCHEAT. The term appears in medieval and early common law texts to denote the forfeiture or reversion of land to the lord of the fee — or, in later usage, to the Crown — upon the failure of heritable blood in the tenant's line or upon the tenant's attainder for felony. As a standalone dictionary entry, ESCHETE is best understood as a variant spelling rather than a doctrinally independent term; its legal content is wholly carried by the doctrine of escheat.
Common Confusion
ESCHETE and ESCHEAT are the same concept at different moments in the language's history. Researchers encountering ESCHETE in early Year Books, plea rolls, or Law French sources should not treat it as a separate legal institution. The two terms are interchangeable in substance; the variation is orthographic and temporal, not doctrinal. Additionally, ESCHETE should not be confused with ESCHET or ESCHIER (the verbal root, meaning to fall or fall in), though all three appear in close proximity in Law French texts and Burrill treats them in the same cluster.
Why It Matters in Research
The principal research value of knowing ESCHETE is navigational: encountering this spelling in a primary source does not signal a distinct legal concept requiring separate analysis. It signals Law French drafting and dates the document to the medieval or early modern period, before English orthography stabilized around ESCHEAT.
Three traps for the unwary:
First, index and digest entries in older compilations may split references between ESCHETE, ESCHEAT, and variant spellings such as ESCHAETE or ESCHETA. A search confined to one spelling may miss relevant material. Burrill himself cross-references across the cluster, and researchers working in pre-1700 sources should cast a wide orthographic net.
Second, the Law French phrase fragment preserved in Burrill — "De eschetes que" — is characteristic of pleading and writ formulas, particularly those addressing the king's or lord's right to fallen lands. Recognizing ESCHETE in such a phrase identifies the document as touching feudal reversion or forfeiture rights, which in turn connects it to a dense body of chancery and exchequer practice that later became the modern law of escheat.
Third, in jurisdictions that inherited English common law, the doctrine underwent significant transformation: the felony-attainder branch was largely abolished in American law and substantially curtailed in England by the Forfeiture Act 1870 and later legislation. The heirship branch survived longer and became the dominant modern meaning. A researcher who encounters ESCHETE in a historical source is almost certainly dealing with the feudal, bilateral lord-tenant relationship — not the modern unilateral state-succession rule. Reading the historical material through a modern lens inverts the doctrinal context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is skeletal — little more than a spelling identification and language tag — but it performs a useful function by flagging the Law French origin and gesturing toward the fuller treatment under ESCHEAT. Burrill provides no independent doctrinal content for ESCHETE itself, which is editorially honest: there is none to provide.
Historical dictionaries that address the broader doctrine (Cowell's Interpreter, Jacob's Law Dictionary, Termes de la Ley) generally enter the term under ESCHEAT or ESCHEATE and treat the Law French variants as orthographic predecessors rather than distinct headwords. None of the major historical dictionaries treats ESCHETE as carrying doctrinal content separate from escheat, and modern scholarship confirms that view.
What historical sources collectively miss is any sustained treatment of the transition from the feudal conception (land falling back to the mesne lord or chief lord on failure of tenure) to the public-law conception (property reverting to the state on failure of heirs or intestacy without kin). That evolution happened gradually across the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and is better reconstructed from the case law and statutes than from any dictionary entry, historical or modern.
Jurisdictional Note
As a spelling variant, ESCHETE has no independent jurisdictional distribution. The underlying doctrine of escheat varies significantly between English and American law, and among American states, but those variations attach to ESCHEAT rather than to this archaic form.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: ESCHEAT (Law Mind Encyclopedia)