Definition
Latin (Law Latin). "Ingress and egress." A phrase from old English law denoting the right or liberty of entering into and going out of land. The term encapsulates the paired freedoms of access and departure — the right to come onto property and to leave it — treated as a single legal entitlement rather than two separate rights.
The phrase appears principally in conveyancing and real property contexts, where a grant or reservation of ingressus et egressus functioned as a recognized formula conferring a right of way or access across land. It operates in the same conceptual space as an easement of passage, though in medieval practice it was often stated as a freestanding liberty rather than as a modern easement with defined dominant and servient tenements.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a formulaic Latin phrase from medieval English real property practice. Researchers encountering it in primary sources — writs, conveyances, pleadings, or statutes — should understand it as a term of art signaling a right of way or liberty of access, not a general philosophical statement about freedom of movement.
Two historical sources anchor the phrase: the Statute of Merton (1236) and Fleta (the late thirteenth-century legal treatise). The Statute of Merton, chapter 4, addressed the rights of widows to dower and specifically invoked free ingress and egress. Fleta, book 4, chapter 18, used the formula in a similarly procedural context. Researchers consulting either source will find the phrase embedded in discussion of dower rights and land tenure — not easement law as a modern practitioner would recognize it.
The practical trap in historical sources is the temptation to read this phrase through the lens of modern easement doctrine. Medieval ingressus et egressus was not necessarily tied to the appurtenance structure that characterizes modern easements. It could be granted personally, as a license, or as part of a broader liberty, without the requirement that a dominant tenement be identified. When the phrase appears in a historical deed or writ, the researcher must examine the surrounding context to determine whether a true property right running with the land was intended, or merely a personal permission.
Because the phrase fell out of active use as English property law systematized easement doctrine, it will not appear in modern American or post-Judicature Act English sources except as a historical quotation. Its appearance in a document is itself a dating indicator — flagging that the instrument or discussion is drawing on pre-modern English land law conventions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the definitive statement for the term as encountered in American legal research. Burrill defines it as a liberty of going into and out of land, illustrated by the formula "et quod habeant liberum ingressum et egressum" (and that they shall have free ingress and egress), citing both the Statute of Merton and Fleta. This is a tight and accurate synthesis.
What Burrill does not do — and what no historical dictionary in this corpus does — is trace the procedural mechanics by which such a liberty was enforced or distinguished from a formal easement of way. The historical dictionaries treat the phrase as a vocabulary item rather than an institution, which is appropriate for a formula that was already archaic by the time American law dictionaries were being compiled. Researchers needing the institutional context must go directly to Bracton, Fleta, or scholarship on medieval English real property.
No meaningful divergence exists among historical sources on the core meaning. The phrase is stable and uncontested in the legal dictionary tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase has no operative role in modern American or English law. It belongs entirely to the pre-modern English common law tradition and survives only in historical primary sources, academic treatments of medieval real property, and occasional quotation in older American treatises. No modern jurisdiction employs it as living doctrine.