Definition
A Latin term of medieval English law carrying several distinct meanings depending on context. Researchers must identify which sense is operative before interpreting any historical document or pleading in which the word appears.
1. Issue or offspring. In its oldest sense, exitus means children or descendants — the biological issue of a named person. A conveyance or entail conditioned on a grantor having exitus was conditioned on the grantor having living children or heirs of the body.
2. Rents, issues, and profits. In property and estate administration, exitus refers to the income, rents, and profits arising from lands and tenements — the productive yield of real property. This is its most frequently encountered meaning in medieval and early modern English legal instruments.
3. Export duty. In fiscal and customs law, exitus denotes a duty levied on goods being exported from a jurisdiction. This usage appears in older revenue statutes and is largely obsolete in modern practice.
4. Conclusion of the pleadings. In common law pleading practice, exitus refers to the formal close or conclusion of the pleadings — the point at which the parties' written submissions have joined an issue for trial or determination.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Death.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not a standard Webster's 1913 entry; the term remained primarily a term of Latin and learned usage in English.
The gap here is consequential. A reader encountering exitus in a modern context will likely understand it as a synonym for death — a meaning drawn from its broader Latin sense of "departure" or "exit." In historical English legal documents, exitus almost never means death. It means issue (children), income from land, an export duty, or the close of pleadings. Importing the modern common meaning into a medieval conveyance, pleading record, or estate account will produce a misreading.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
No formally recognized subcategories. The four senses listed in the definition are contextually distinct meanings, not subcategories of a single concept. Context — property instrument, fiscal record, pleading roll, or genealogical recital — determines which sense governs.
Why It Matters in Research
The principal research trap is the ambiguity between the "issue/offspring" sense and the "rents and profits" sense. Both appear in property instruments, and careless reading can confuse a clause about whether someone left children with a clause about the income a property generated. When reading a medieval or early modern deed, indenture, or court record, note which clause type surrounds the word: genealogical recitals use exitus in the offspring sense; accounting and revenue clauses use it in the income sense.
The pleading sense matters for researchers working with common law plea rolls and Year Book material. Exitus as "conclusion of the pleadings" marks a procedural moment — the point at which the issue is formed — and signals what type of trial or proceeding follows. Missing this sense leads to misidentifying where in a pleading sequence a document falls.
The export duty sense is narrow and appears mainly in revenue and customs records. It is not a live meaning in any modern jurisdiction.
Chronologically, the offspring and rents-and-profits senses dominate from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, English legal writing increasingly uses English equivalents (issue, profits, rents) and exitus retreats to formulaic Latin in older instruments. Post-1700 appearances of the term are most often quotations from or references to earlier instruments rather than live usage.
Researchers using digitized corpus searches should query all four senses and apply a date filter. A hit in a sixteenth-century conveyance almost certainly means rents or offspring; a hit in a nineteenth-century treatise is almost certainly a historical quotation or terminological gloss.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) give identical short entries listing all four meanings without priority or contextual guidance. The brevity is a limitation: neither edition distinguishes which sense predominates in which documentary context, and neither flags the chronological trajectory of the term's use.
Burrill is more instructive. He roots the term in exire (to go out, to proceed from), which illuminates why a single Latin word could span offspring, income, duties, and the end of pleadings — all involve something "proceeding from" a source (a person, land, goods, or a pleading sequence). Burrill provides an illustrative quotation from Monasticon Anglicanum showing the offspring sense in practice: habuit exitum Thomam — "had issue Thomas." This is a useful anchor for researchers reading medieval records.
None of the three dictionaries address the chronological displacement of the term or its obsolescence in modern usage, which is the more pressing research concern for Law Mind corpus users.
Jurisdictional Note
Exitus is a term of historical English common law and has no current operative meaning in any common law jurisdiction. Its appearance in American legal sources is limited to quotations from or analyses of English precedent and historical instruments. Civil law jurisdictions did not use the term in these senses.