Definition
Goods and chattels is a compound phrase of art denoting personal property in its broadest sense — everything a person owns that is not real property (land and fixtures permanently attached to land). The phrase operates as a unit: "goods" captures the core of tangible, movable personal property, while "chattels" extends the reach of the phrase to categories that "goods" alone would not reliably include.
The phrase encompasses:
1. Tangible personal property in possession — physical, movable objects: tools, furniture, livestock, vehicles, merchandise, stock in trade.
2. Choses in action — intangible rights to recover a sum or enforce a claim, enforceable through legal action rather than physical possession (debts, negotiable instruments, contract rights).
3. Chattels real — interests in land that are personal rather than real in legal character, most importantly leasehold estates (a lease for years of a house or land). Despite their connection to real property, these are legally classified as personal property.
4. Living animals — animate property, which "goods" alone might not clearly include.
5. Emblements — crops produced by human cultivation, treated as personal property even when still attached to the soil.
The phrase appears most frequently in older statutes, wills, deeds of gift, bills of sale, and legal pleadings to signal an intent to transfer or subject to legal process the full extent of a party's personal estate, leaving no arguable gap.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Goods" refers to physical commodities or merchandise. "Chattels" has limited modern common usage but survives in phrases like "chattel slavery" to mean a person treated as movable property.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Goods" — property; especially, movable effects or personal estate; wares; merchandise. "Chattel" — any item of movable property; all property except freehold land and things incident thereto.
The gap between common and legal usage is real and consequential. In ordinary language, "goods" suggests merchandise or physical objects, and most modern speakers would read "goods and chattels" as a redundant pairing of synonyms for movable stuff. Legally, the phrase is carefully constructed: "chattels" does specific technical work, pulling in choses in action, leaseholds, and animate property that "goods" would leave ambiguous. A reader who treats the phrase as mere emphasis will miss its intentional comprehensiveness.
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Common Confusion
Goods and chattels is sometimes read as synonymous with "personal property" in a loose, modern sense — but the phrase carries a specific historical scope that differs from how "personal property" is used today. Modern commercial statutes (including Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code) have their own precise classification schemes for personal property (goods, accounts, instruments, chattel paper, general intangibles, etc.) that do not map cleanly onto the older goods-and-chattels framework. Researchers reading a 19th-century document must resist importing UCC definitions backward into the phrase.
The phrase should also be distinguished from "goods" alone as used in the Statute of Frauds and sale-of-goods contexts, where "goods" has a narrower, more specific statutory definition that excludes choses in action and real property interests.
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Why It Matters in Research
The phrase is a marker of drafting era. Its appearance in a document — will, bill of sale, execution, statutory text, pleading — signals pre-20th-century origins or deliberate archaism. Researchers should treat it as a scope signal: the drafter intended to capture everything movable and intangible that would not pass with the land.
Trap for historical research: "Goods" standing alone in older documents may be narrower than it looks. Courts and treatise writers of the 17th through 19th centuries sometimes held that "goods" alone did not reach choses in action or living animals. The addition of "chattels" was not ornamental — it was a deliberate fix for known ambiguity. When analyzing an older will or conveyance that uses only "goods" (without "chattels"), a researcher cannot assume the same broad scope.
Statutory contexts: Many older English and American statutes used "goods and chattels" as the operative phrase for what could be seized in execution of a judgment, subjected to testamentary bequest, or covered by a general assignment for benefit of creditors. When tracing what property was reachable under pre-UCC lien and execution law, this phrase is the key.
Leasehold inclusion: The treatment of chattels real (leaseholds) as personal property for purposes of this phrase has ongoing relevance in estates and trusts research. An 18th- or 19th-century testator who bequeathed "all my goods and chattels" likely passed a leasehold to the personal estate beneficiaries, not the real property beneficiaries. Modern instruments accomplish this through explicit language, but historical documents relied on the phrase to do this work.
Corpus connections: The phrase links the property, contracts, and torts encyclopedias. In property, it surfaces in adverse possession of personal property and the historical treatment of leaseholds. In contracts and commercial law, it is the precursor to modern collateral classification under secured transactions. In torts, trespass to chattels applies to the animate and inanimate personal property the phrase encompasses.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree on the core function of the phrase: it is a comprehensive designation for personal property, with "chattels" serving to extend what "goods" alone would not reach. Burrill is the most precise, specifying that the phrase includes property in possession, choses in action, and — by force of "chattels" — all animate as well as inanimate property, emblements, and other categories. Bouvier adds chattels real (leaseholds) explicitly and offers the most concrete illustrations, including a railroad-ties case and a merchant's stock in trade as "goods and chattels permanently located" for tax purposes.
Black's formulation is functionally consistent with Burrill and Bouvier but somewhat abbreviated, noting the extension to living animals, emblements, and terms (leaseholds). Rapalje & Lawrence provides no independent definition, cross-referencing only, which itself signals that the phrase was considered settled law needing no elaboration by the late 19th century.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the collision between this phrase and the increasingly precise personal property classifications that emerged in the 20th century. None anticipate the UCC's disaggregation of personal property into discrete collateral categories. Researchers must supply this bridge themselves.
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Jurisdictional Note
American courts generally followed the English common law scope of the phrase, but specific applications — particularly whether a given item qualified as a chattel real or whether certain intangibles fell within the phrase — were occasionally disputed and resolved differently across states. Modern statutory schemes in most U.S. jurisdictions have largely displaced this phrase as operative law, but it remains significant in construing older instruments and statutes still in effect or at issue in litigation.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia: Secured Transactions — Classification of Collateral (Goods, Accounts, Instruments, Chattel Paper, etc.) [contracts_136] — for the modern successor framework that replaced goods-and-chattels as the organizing concept in commercial finance.
The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia: Adverse Possession — Personal Property (Chattels) [property_91] — for the property law treatment of chattels as objects of possessory rights and claims.
The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia: Intentional Torts — Property and Economic — Trespass to Chattels [torts_106] — for the tort doctrine governing interference with personal property within the scope of this phrase.
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