Definition
Hors de son fee (Law French: "out of his fee") is a plea or exception formerly available in actions brought for rent, customs, or services issuing out of land. The defendant invoking this plea asserted that the land in question lay outside the compass of the plaintiff's fee — that is, outside the territorial or tenurial extent of the lordship from which the plaintiff claimed the right to demand rent or services. If the defendant successfully proved this, the plaintiff's action failed entirely, as the foundational premise of the claim — that the land was held within the plaintiff's fee — was defeated.
The plea operated as a traverse of the plaintiff's title to exact feudal obligations, not as a denial that rent or services were owed in the abstract, but as a specific denial that the plaintiff had any tenurial authority over the land from which those obligations were said to arise.
Common Language
This is pure legal jargon of Law French origin with no counterpart in ordinary English usage. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a narrow stratum of medieval pleading vocabulary that surfaces almost exclusively in early English Year Books, abridgments, and treatises on feudal tenure. Researchers encountering it in primary sources should understand several points.
First, the term is diagnostic of feudal context. Its appearance in a pleading record signals that the underlying dispute concerns tenurial obligations — rent service, rent charge, customs, or suit of court — not modern contractual rent. Do not transpose modern landlord-tenant analysis onto cases where this plea appears.
Second, the plea is jurisdictionally limited to English common law history. It has no living counterpart in any contemporary jurisdiction. Researchers working in American legal history will not find it in post-colonial practice; it belongs to the English feudal period and ceased to be a functioning plea as feudal tenures were abolished and reformed, a process substantially advanced by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660 in England.
Third, the corpus connections run through treatises rather than cases. Burrill points to Britton (c. 38) and Reeves' History of English Law; Rapalje cites Coke's Reports (9 Co. 30) and Modern Reports (2 Mod. 104). Researchers tracing the plea's procedural operation will find Britton and Bracton more useful than case reporters, as the plea was largely obsolete by the time systematic law reporting developed. Termes de la Ley, cited by Burrill, is an early legal dictionary that treated the term as already requiring explanation for readers of its own era — itself a signal of the term's archaic character by the sixteenth century.
Fourth, the Latin equivalent extra feodum (noted by Burrill) may appear in Latin-language records where the Law French form does not. Researchers in ecclesiastical or chancery records should search both forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree on the core meaning and function of the plea, though they vary in depth. Black's offers the most compressed account, useful as a quick identifier. Rapalje adds the citation to Coke and the Modern Reports but provides no elaboration on procedural mechanics. Burrill is the most instructive, specifying that the plaintiff was typically someone "pretending to be the lord" — language that captures the plea's role in contesting the legitimacy of feudal claims, not merely their geographic scope. Burrill's reference to Termes de la Ley situates the term within early legal lexicography, confirming that it was treated as a term of art requiring definition well before the modern period.
None of the three dictionaries addresses the procedural consequence of a failed plea — that is, what happened if the defendant could not prove the land lay outside the fee — nor do they discuss the burden of proof or the relationship between this plea and other defenses available in actions for rent. Reeves' History of English Law (cited by Burrill) provides the fullest narrative context available in accessible English-language sources for understanding how this plea fit within the broader system of feudal pleading.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the historical common law of England. It has no recognized equivalent in Scottish, Welsh, or Irish legal traditions under their distinct tenure systems, and it did not transplant into colonial American law in any operative sense. It is encountered today only in historical legal research.