Definition
A term appearing in older legal texts as a variant of, or cross-reference to, ENDOWMENT. In its legal usage, indument refers to the act or instrument by which a right, benefit, or property interest — most commonly a dower right or ecclesiastical endowment — is formally conferred upon a person or institution. The term carries no independent legal definition in the major historical dictionaries; all three source authorities direct the reader to "endowment" without elaboration.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A garment, robe, or article of clothing; also plumage or feathers (from the Latin indumentum, meaning that which is put on).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Plumage; feathers."
The gap between common and legal meaning here is substantial and worth flagging. In ordinary English — both historical and modern — indument and its Latin root indumentum describe something worn on the body: clothing, a robe, or a bird's feathers. In legal usage, the term bears no such meaning. It functions exclusively as an archaic synonym for endowment, referring to the conveyance of a property right or benefit, not to any garment or covering. A researcher encountering "indument" in a legal instrument should not import the textile or ornithological sense.
Common Confusion
Indument is easily mistaken for indumentum in its botanical or zoological sense (a covering of hairs, scales, or feathers on a plant or animal), which appears in scientific literature of the same period. Researchers working in historical archives where legal and natural history materials coexist should be alert to this overlap. Within legal literature specifically, the term may also be confused with inurement (a separate doctrine concerning the prohibition on private benefit from nonprofit assets) due partly to phonetic similarity and partly to loose early transcription practices.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational dead end in isolation — its value lies entirely in recognizing it as a pointer to endowment doctrine. Researchers who encounter "indument" in an older deed, ecclesiastical record, or common law pleading should immediately pivot to the endowment entries in their source materials and should not expect to find independent treatment of the term.
Several practical traps exist in the historical corpus:
First, because all three source dictionaries offer only a cross-reference, a researcher relying on any one of them in isolation will find minimal guidance. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is particularly misleading in its layout: the cross-reference to endowment is followed immediately by unrelated entries (inevitable casualty, inevitable dangers of the river, inewardus), which, depending on the edition's pagination and typesetting, can create the false impression that those entries bear some definitional relationship to indument.
Second, the Latin root indumentum was used in ecclesiastical and canon law contexts in a sense closer to its common meaning — vestments and liturgical clothing — which occasionally appears in records touching on church property disputes. In that narrow context, the word may not be a legal term of art at all but a descriptive Latin phrase. Corpus researchers should distinguish between indument appearing as a legal term of art (pointing to endowment) and indumentum appearing as a Latin descriptor in ecclesiastical inventories.
Third, the term's phonetic proximity to inurement may produce false positives in full-text search across digitized legal corpora. Refine searches accordingly.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source authorities — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Rapalje & Lawrence — treat indument identically: a one-line cross-reference to endowment, with no independent definition offered. This uniformity confirms that the term had no disputed or contested legal meaning requiring resolution; it was simply a recognized variant spelling or Anglicization of the Latin endowmentum concept.
What the historical dictionaries miss: none of the three sources address the common-language meaning of the word, nor do they flag the potential for confusion arising from the term's dual existence in legal and non-legal literature. A researcher working only from these dictionaries would have no warning that "indument" in a non-legal document of the same era means something entirely different.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is worth examining for what surrounds it rather than what it says. The adjacent entries — including the treatment of inevitable casualty and inevitable dangers of the river — belong to an entirely separate conceptual family (force majeure and carrier liability). Their proximity is an artifact of alphabetical arrangement, not doctrinal connection.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Endowment; Dower and Curtesy.