Definition
A piece or parcel of land lying by itself, distinct and separate from any other holding. The term describes a discrete unit of land that stands alone — not contiguous with, attached to, or intermixed with other lands of the same owner or tenant. It denotes the physical and legal separateness of a tract, emphasizing its character as a self-contained unit of real property.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a rare technical term of the older common law of real property, appearing almost exclusively in early English land law materials and the treatises that drew from them. Researchers encountering it in historical deeds, pleadings, or land grants should treat it as a signal that the document is describing a parcel with legal significance as a standalone unit — relevant, for example, in questions of adverse possession, partition, or the construction of conveyances where the identity and boundaries of a tract are in dispute.
The term appears in Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 5b), which is its principal source of authority. Because Black's 2nd Edition draws directly from that citation, researchers who need to go deeper must go to Coke directly; no meaningful elaboration exists in American case law or statutory materials. The term did not migrate into American legal usage with any frequency and will not be found as a defined term in most 19th- or 20th-century American sources.
The practical research trap is misreading the term in manuscript or early printed sources where the Latin abbreviation or archaic spelling may be rendered inconsistently. Variant spellings or truncations (frustrum terrae being the fuller Latin form) may appear in older indexes without cross-referencing.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) gives the definition concisely — "a piece or parcel of land lying by itself" — with the sole citation to Co. Litt. 5b. This reflects the term's narrow and stable meaning in the sources: there is no recorded doctrinal evolution, no contested interpretation, and no divergence across historical dictionaries because the term is scarcely treated outside of Coke's gloss on Littleton.
The brevity of the historical record is itself informative. The term belongs to the highly formulaic vocabulary of early common law land description, where Latin phrases served as precise technical shorthand in an era before standardized survey description. Its meaning was apparently settled enough that later lexicographers either adopted the Coke definition wholesale or omitted the term entirely. No significant points of disagreement or elaboration appear in the available historical dictionary record.