Definition
Hir is an archaic English term appearing in early common law sources as a variant spelling of "her" or, in some contexts, as a form related to hire or possession. In legal usage, however, the term is encountered primarily in the context of tidal boundary law, where Burrill's Law Dictionary connects the entry to the high-water mark — the boundary line established by the ordinary flow of tides, which historically defined the seaward limit of private landholding and the landward limit of the public foreshore. The term itself is incidental to the substantive doctrine it annotates, and researchers encountering "hir" in historical legal manuscripts or marginalia should treat it as an orthographic variant rather than a term of independent legal art.
In the tidal boundary context, the operative concept is the line of ordinary high tide, unaffected by extraordinary meteorological or lunar causes — the standard against which foreshore ownership, riparian rights, and public access to navigable waters have long been measured.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A gender-neutral third-person singular object pronoun, coordinate with "him" and "her." Used in contemporary writing to avoid gendered language.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 refers the reader to "Here, pron." as used by Chaucer, indicating the term functioned as an archaic or dialectal form of "her" in Middle English.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is categorical. The contemporary use of "hir" as a gender-neutral pronoun has no connection to the legal and historical uses. A researcher encountering "hir" in a medieval or early modern legal document is almost certainly reading a spelling variant of "her" or an abbreviated reference in a boundary or property context — not a pronoun in any modern sense, and not a term of legal art in its own right.
Common Confusion
Researchers should not conflate the orthographic form "hir" with the substantive doctrines it appears alongside in Burrill. The high-water mark doctrine — including its distinction between ordinary and extraordinary tidal flow — is a developed body of law with its own terminology (flood-mark, haut fil de mer, foreshore, mean high tide). "Hir" in these sources is a scribal or typographic artifact, not a technical term. Separately, researchers using full-text search tools on digitized historical corpora should be aware that "hir" may also surface as a variant of "hire" (the contract for use or labor), producing false positives across two entirely distinct bodies of law.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical significance of this entry is navigational. A researcher working in tidal boundary law, foreshore rights, or public trust doctrine in historical sources will occasionally encounter "hir" in ways that resist easy parsing. Burrill's entry ties the term to the high-water mark line — a boundary of constitutional and common law importance in both English and American jurisprudence. The cases cited in Burrill (5 B. & Ald. 268; 7 Peters' R. 324; 6 Mass. R. 435; 13 Howard's R. 421) concern the definition and legal effect of that line, and those are the substantive authorities to pursue. The term "hir" itself will not appear as a search term in any modern legal database and carries no independent doctrinal weight.
Researchers conducting full-text corpus searches across Law Mind's historical legal materials should treat "hir" as a search noise term in most contexts and pivot immediately to the controlling vocabulary: high-water mark, flood-mark, foreshore, ordinary tides, mean high tide, and the Latin phrase haut fil de mer (rendered in French-influenced English legal sources as "high line of the sea"). Burrill's cross-reference to "Fil" (as in fil de mer) is the productive thread to follow.
The Latin entry — hir as a form of "hand" (from Greek χείρ), used in the sense of the palm employed in tasting wine — is a philological curiosity with no legal application. It appears in Lucilius via Cicero and is noted in the grammarians Charisius and Priscinus. Researchers in Roman law or legal Latin will not encounter this usage in any operative legal text.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not treat "hir" as a freestanding legal term. The entry functions as a hook into the law of tidal boundaries, and Burrill marshals a coherent line of authority around the definition of the high-water mark. The formulation attributed to Justice Nelson — "the margin of the periodical flow of the tide, unaffected by extraordinary causes" — represents the dominant American standard as of the mid-nineteenth century and remains influential in foreshore and public trust doctrine. Burrill's note that the same concept was "anciently called flood-mark" and the "high line of the sea (haut fil de mer)" usefully bridges English common law sources to their Norman French antecedents. No other standard historical legal dictionary (Black's, Bouvier's, Tomlin's) carries an entry under "hir," confirming that the term is not part of the recognized legal lexicon and appears in Burrill primarily as a scribal or alphabetization artifact directing the reader to adjacent doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
The high-water mark doctrine — the substantive law behind this entry — varies significantly between jurisdictions. English common law traditionally vested the foreshore (between mean high and mean low tide) in the Crown. American states diverged, with some following the common law rule and others (particularly coastal states with Spanish or French colonial heritage) applying different standards. This variation is material to property and public access research and should be investigated jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: TIDE WATERS; FORESHORE; PUBLIC TRUST DOCTRINE