Definition
A mine. In historical legal usage, fodina refers to an excavation in the earth worked for the extraction of minerals — what modern law would call a mine. The term appears in property and real property law contexts where the nature of the land interest (and what it includes or excludes) turns on whether the ground contains a mine, quarry, or other mineral extraction site.
Why It Matters in Research
Fodina is a term of art drawn from Latin legal usage and appears almost exclusively in historical sources and older treatises on real property and land rights. Researchers working with pre-twentieth-century materials on mining rights, conveyancing, or the law of minerals will encounter it in that context.
The term's significance in historical sources derives from the question of what passes with a grant of land — whether a mine (fodina) was included or reserved when land changed hands. Coke upon Littleton (Co. Litt. 6a), the shared authority for all three dictionary sources, anchors the term to that conveyancing tradition. Researchers should note that this citation is not to a case or statute but to Coke's commentary on Littleton's Tenures, a foundational English common law text. Arguments built around fodina in early American or English cases will almost always trace back to that source.
Modern mining law has entirely displaced this Latin terminology. American statutory mining law, federal public lands law, and state mineral rights frameworks use "mine," "mineral estate," "mineral rights," and related modern terms. A researcher who encounters fodina in a historical deed, pleading, or judicial opinion should treat it as equivalent to "mine" and then trace the surrounding legal question — reservation, conveyance, trespass, royalty — through that lens.
There is no meaningful jurisdictional variation for the term itself, since it is obsolete Latin. But the underlying substantive question — what a grantor conveys or reserves when land containing a mine is transferred — varies considerably by jurisdiction in modern law.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree: fodina means "a mine," and all cite Coke upon Littleton at 6a as the authority. The definition is one of the shortest in the corpus, reflecting that the term carried no disputed meaning. It was simply the Latin designation for the thing.
Burrill's Law Dictionary adds a cross-reference note by placing fodina immediately before foedus (a treaty in international law), suggesting the proximity is alphabetical, not conceptual. Burrill also includes "foderæ; the plural, meaning mines" implicitly through the structure of the entry. Burrill does not add substantive content beyond the Coke citation, but his dictionary's fuller citation practice — referencing Grotius and Wheaton in adjacent entries — signals the era of scholarship in which these terms were current.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is any doctrinal depth: there is no discussion of what rights attach to a fodina, how it was distinguished from a quarry (often treated differently at common law), or what the consequences were if a grantor conveyed land not knowing a mine lay beneath it. Researchers who need that doctrinal content should look to historical treatises on real property and mineral rights rather than to dictionary entries.