Definition
In old English law, that which is not titheable — not subject to the obligation to pay tithes. Tithes were compulsory contributions, typically one-tenth of produce or income, owed to the established church or its lay impropriators. Property or persons described as indecimable were exempt from this obligation, whether by reason of royal grant, ecclesiastical privilege, prescription, statute, or the inherent nature of the thing in question.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not decimable, or liable to be decimated; not liable to the payment of tithes.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not decimable, or liable to be decimated; not liable to the payment of tithes. Cowell.
The common and legal definitions here are effectively identical in wording, but the shared language conceals a practical gap for modern readers. "Decimated" in contemporary English almost universally means destroyed or greatly reduced in number — its root connection to one-tenth (Latin decima) has faded almost entirely from common awareness. A modern reader encountering indecimable without context may not immediately parse it as a term about church taxes on a tenth of income or produce. The legal meaning is narrow and historical: exemption from tithe obligations specifically, not exemption from any kind of proportional levy or loss.
Why It Matters in Research
Indecimable is an archaic term of English ecclesiastical and agricultural law with no surviving operational legal meaning in modern American or English practice. Tithes as compulsory legal obligations were substantially abolished in England by the Tithe Commutation Act 1836 and extinguished as legal obligations by the Tithe Act 1936. Researchers will encounter indecimable almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English sources: ecclesiastical court records, enclosure proceedings, manor rolls, common law pleadings in tithe disputes, and ecclesiastical treatises.
The primary research trap is assuming the term signals a general principle of exemption transferable to modern tax or assessment law. It does not. Indecimable describes a specific historical status within a defunct legal regime. When the term appears in secondary legal literature or encyclopedia entries, it functions as a defined historical artifact rather than a live legal category.
The citation to 2 Inst. 490 — Coke's Institutes of the Laws of England, Second Part — appears uniformly across all five source dictionaries. Researchers consulting historical sources should treat this cross-reference as the terminus of the definition rather than a starting point for broader doctrine. Coke's treatment addresses tithes in the context of real property and ecclesiastical obligations; it does not establish a general exemption framework with modern application.
Jurisdictional connection is exclusively English. American law never incorporated a general tithing obligation as a civil legal duty, so indecimable has no natural American legal counterpart and appears in American legal dictionaries only as a historical entry carried over from English sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries are in complete agreement on both definition and scope. Black's Law Dictionary (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, Burrill's, and Bouvier's converge on the same formulation — not titheable, not liable to pay tithes — and all trace the term to 2 Inst. 490. The uniformity is itself informative: there is no contested meaning, no jurisdictional variation worth noting, and no evolution of the term's legal content across the dictionary tradition. It entered English legal lexicography as a term of art from ecclesiastical law, was recorded consistently for centuries, and became obsolete with the abolition of tithes as a civil obligation.
Burrill's alone supplies the Latin form (indecimabilis) and parses the construction explicitly — in privative plus decimæ — which is useful for researchers tracing the term through Latin ecclesiastical records or civil law texts where the Latinate form may appear.
Webster's 1913 adds a cross-reference to Cowell — John Cowell's Interpreter (1607), an early English legal dictionary — indicating the term's presence in the legal lexicographic tradition well before the modern dictionary sources. Researchers working in seventeenth-century ecclesiastical law may find Cowell's entry a useful primary reference point.
No historical dictionary identifies exemption categories (the grounds on which property might be indecimable), which is a notable gap for researchers who need to understand why a particular parcel or person held indecimable status in a specific dispute.