Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil and old English law with two distinct applications:
1. (Civil law) To put or let something into the property of another — most commonly, to insert a structural element such as a beam into a shared or neighboring wall. The act gave rise to questions of servitude, property rights, and neighbor relations under Roman law.
2. (Old English law) To put or drive cattle onto a common — the act of exercising a right of common pasture by introducing livestock onto shared grazing land.
Both meanings share the same core sense: placing something (a physical object or animals) into or onto a space to which the actor has some legal right or claim.
Common Language
This is pure legal Latin with no counterpart in common modern or historical English usage. The COMMON LANGUAGE section does not apply.
Common Confusion
Researchers should not conflate the two distinct uses of this term. The civil law meaning (inserting a structural element into a wall) belongs to the law of servitudes and property relations between neighbors, and is traceable to the Digest. The old English meaning (putting cattle on a common) belongs to the law of common pasture rights — a completely different doctrinal context. Both meanings appear in the same dictionary entries without clear visual separation, making careless conflation easy. When encountering immittere in a historical source, context — particularly whether the document concerns Roman property servitudes or English agrarian common rights — determines which meaning applies.
Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning of immittere creates a genuine indexing and interpretive hazard in the Law Mind corpus. A treatise on Roman law servitudes and a medieval English record about rights of common may both use this single word, but they are reaching for entirely different legal concepts.
For researchers working in Roman law and civil law property: immittere in its beam-and-wall sense connects to the doctrine of servitudes (specifically tignum immittere — the right to insert a beam into a neighbor's wall), which was a recognized praedial servitude under Roman law. The relevant passage at Digest 50.17.242.1 situates immittere within a general principle about what one may lawfully do in another's property. This connects to the larger structure of iura in re aliena and should be traced alongside terms like servitus and tignum.
For researchers working in English common law and agrarian history: immittere in its common-pasture sense is the operative verb for the act of commoning itself — the physical exercise of a right of common. Fleta (a late thirteenth-century English legal treatise) uses the term in this sense. Researchers searching for historical records about rights of common, stinting, and overcharging of commons should be alert to this usage.
Neither meaning carries forward into modern Anglo-American legal usage as a technical term. Researchers will not find immittere in modern cases or statutes. Its appearance in a source almost certainly signals a historical or comparative law context.
Because Black's Law Dictionary immediately appends the maxim Immobilia situm sequuntur to its entry on immittere, researchers scrolling quickly through the dictionary may misread the maxim as a continuation of the immittere definition. It is not. The maxim is a separate entry that was run together typographically in the original edition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in full agreement on both definitions and cite identical authorities: Calvin's Lexicon Iuridicum for the civil law meaning and Fleta, lib. 4, c. 20, § 7 for the old English meaning. The entries are essentially identical across all three sources, suggesting Black's drew on Burrill without material revision.
What the historical dictionaries do not do is explain the doctrinal significance of either meaning. The civil law definition of immittere is more important than the bare entry suggests: the right tignum immittere — the right to have one's beam rest in a neighbor's wall — was a classical example of a praedial urban servitude, discussed in the Digest and treated by later civil law commentators as foundational to the law of building-related servitudes. The dictionary entries, by citing only Digest 50.17.242.1 (a maxims title rather than a substantive servitudes title), underrepresent the term's doctrinal weight. Researchers wanting the full civil law context should look to Digest 8.2 (on urban praedial servitudes) rather than relying on the citation given.
The Fleta citation is accurate. Fleta is an anonymous late-thirteenth-century English legal treatise modeled on Bracton, and its use of immittere to describe putting cattle on a common reflects standard Latin legal vocabulary of the period for agrarian rights.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Servitudes (Civil Law); Rights of Common.