Definition
An archaic or rare synonym for inheritance or heritage — that which is passed down from an ancestor to an heir, whether by operation of law or by testamentary disposition. The term encompasses both the property itself (the thing inherited) and the act or right of inheriting. It carries no distinct legal meaning separate from inheritance; its appearance in legal texts is a stylistic or period choice rather than a term of art.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Inheritance; the act of inheriting or something inherited.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Heritage; inheritance. Marked as rare, illustrated by Southey's poetic usage: "Robbing their children of the heritance / Their fathers handed down."
The gap between common and legal usage here is minimal — heritance means essentially the same thing in both registers. What distinguishes it in a legal research context is not a difference in meaning but a difference in prevalence: the term is rare in formal legal instruments and virtually absent from modern legal discourse, making it a marker of historical or literary usage rather than operative legal language.
Common Confusion
HERITANCE vs. HERITAGE vs. INHERITANCE: These three terms occupy overlapping territory. In modern law, inheritance is the operative term — the transmission of property from a decedent to an heir. Heritage carries a broader, often non-legal sense of cultural or ancestral legacy. Heritance is the rarest of the three and functions as a near-perfect synonym for inheritance in historical contexts, but it never achieved standing as a technical legal term. Researchers encountering heritance in older documents should read it as inheritance unless context suggests otherwise.
Why It Matters in Research
Heritance is a research signal, not a research destination. Its primary value is as a dating and sourcing clue: encountering the term in a document suggests literary influence, historical drafting conventions, or a non-lawyer author. It does not appear as a defined term in modern statutory codes, restatements, or uniform acts.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note:
First, Black's Law Dictionary does not define heritance independently — it redirects entirely to ATTENDANT TERMS, which is itself a historical doctrine relating to terms of years created to support the inheritance of settled estates. This cross-reference is not intuitive and suggests that historical editors treated heritance as too archaic to merit standalone treatment but connected it to the broader architecture of inheritance law.
Second, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry reproduced under this headword in the source material is almost certainly a cataloging or indexing artifact — the text describes deserted premises law and has no substantive connection to heritance. Researchers should not treat that content as definitionally linked to this term.
Third, because heritance never functioned as a term of art, it will not appear in index headings of legal encyclopedias or treatises in the way that inheritance, descent, or devise will. Full-text searching of historical corpora is the appropriate method for locating it.
Historical Dictionary Support
Neither Black's Law Dictionary nor Rapalje & Lawrence provides a substantive independent definition of heritance. Black's redirect to ATTENDANT TERMS is the only entry, and the Rapalje & Lawrence material associated with this headword in the source data pertains to a different subject entirely.
Webster's 1913 is the most informative source here, confirming that the term was recognized as rare even in the nineteenth century and appeared primarily in literary contexts. The Southey citation places it firmly in the poetic register, not the courtroom.
This convergence across sources — no substantive legal definition, rare general usage, literary examples — supports the conclusion that heritance was never adopted into the technical vocabulary of common law. Historical legal dictionaries largely ignored it because practitioners did not use it. Modern dictionaries follow suit.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: INHERITANCE; DESCENT AND DISTRIBUTION; ATTENDANT TERMS