FULLUM AQUE - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

FULLUM AQUEAuthored

The Law Mind • 517 words

Definition

Fullum aque is a Latin phrase from English legal history meaning a fleam or stream of water. The term appears in older common law sources as a descriptor of a water feature — specifically a flowing stream or channel — and carried significance in disputes and grants involving water rights, mill operations, and riparian land use. It is a term of description rather than a term of art creating legal rights on its own; its meaning depended on context within a deed, charter, or pleading.

Why It Matters in Research

Researchers encountering fullum aque in historical documents — particularly medieval or early modern English deeds, grants, and pleadings — should treat it as a descriptive geographic or property term. Its primary utility is identifying what kind of water feature was at issue in a dispute or conveyance. The phrase is found in Blount's legal glossary tradition, which both Rapalje & Lawrence and Bouvier relied upon; this means the term entered American legal dictionaries by inheritance from English antiquarian legal scholarship, not from active American litigation use.

A critical navigational point: both Rapalje & Lawrence and Bouvier place fullum aque immediately before their entries on FUMAGE, FUAGE, or FOUAGE (the chimney or hearth tax), and the historical dictionary text for these two entries runs together in the source material. Researchers reading photocopies or transcriptions of these dictionaries should be aware of this adjacency and ensure they are reading the correct entry and not confusing the water-term definition with the tax-term definition that follows it.

The term is unlikely to appear in American case law in any significant volume. Its research value lies almost entirely in interpreting English historical instruments — manor records, monastic grants, watercourse disputes — and in understanding the Latin vocabulary of pre-modern riparian law. Researchers working on water rights history or mill-site conveyances should note the connection to related Latin and Anglo-Norman terms for water channels and flows that appear in the same archival environment.

Historical Dictionary Support

Rapalje & Lawrence and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: both define fullum aque as "a fleam, or stream of water," and both attribute the definition to Blount — a reference to Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexikon: A Law-Dictionary (1670), one of the foundational English legal glossaries. Neither dictionary elaborates further, which itself is informative: the term was received into American legal dictionaries as antiquarian vocabulary rather than as a living legal concept with active doctrinal development.

The brevity of both entries reflects the term's status. It is not defined in functional terms (what rights attach, what its presence in a deed means for adjacent landowners) because those questions would be resolved by the broader law of watercourses and riparian rights, not by the phrase itself. Neither dictionary flags jurisdictional variation or cites cases, confirming that the term did not generate significant litigation in the American context.

FULLUM AQUEmain

Rapalje & Lawrence • 1888

A fleam, or stream of water. Blount. FUMAGE, FUAGE, or FOUAGE. - A tax paid to the sovereign for every house that had a chimney. It is probable that the hearth-money, imposed by 13 and 14 Car. II. c. 10, took its origin hence. This hearth-money was declared a great oppression, and abolished by 1 W. & M. Stat. 1, c. 10; but a tax was afterwards laid upon all houses, except cottages, and upon all windows, by 7 Wm. III. c. 18. The window duty was repealed by 14 and 15 Vict. c. 36.-Wharton. interest due on its bonds, or the like, meaning that the interest is capitalized and made to bear interest in its turn, until it is repaid. 3. Funded and unfunded debt.- The national debt of Great Britain is in part funded and in part unfunded, the former being that which is secured to the creditor or holder upon the public funds, the matter that which is not so provided for. The unfunded debt is comparatively but of small amount, and is generally secured by exchequer bills and bonds (q. v.) The funded debt consists of annuities, as they are called, granted to those who originally advanced the money, being the right to receive an annual sum equal to interest at a certain rate on the principal advanced. The principal itself is not repayable, except at the option of the government. These annuities are charged on the consolidated fund (g..v.), and are themselves popularly called the public funds. They are a species of personal property, passing by transfer inter vivos, or on the death of the holder to his personal representatives. See the National Debt Act, 1870. FUNDAMENTAL LAWS.-Constitutions, and other organic laws; laws which control and regulate the exercise of governmental power.