Definition
Intakes are temporary enclosures made by customary tenants of a manor under a special manorial custom, by which a portion of the waste land is fenced off and cultivated until one or more crops have been raised upon it. Once the permitted cropping is complete, the enclosed land reverts to its status as open waste. The practice is rooted in the customary tenure system of English feudal land law, where the lord of the manor's waste could be temporarily appropriated by tenants only within the limits set by established local custom.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The plural of "intake" — things taken in, as in air intakes, water intakes, or the intake of food and substance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An intake is a place where water is taken into a channel or pipe; also, a narrowing or contraction in a tube or shaft. The sense of "taking in" from the outside world.
The gap here is complete. The common word "intake" carries no suggestion of land tenure, enclosure, or agrarian custom. A researcher encountering "intakes" in manorial records or older English land documents should not interpret the term in any ordinary sense — it describes a specific legal practice of temporary enclosure, not any act of receiving or ingesting.
Why It Matters in Research
Intakes appear almost exclusively in English manorial court records, surveys of the waste, and historical treatises on commons law. Researchers working with pre-enclosure English land records — particularly court baron rolls, presentments, and custumals — may encounter the term used to describe contested temporary enclosures that tenants claimed under local custom. The central issue in manorial disputes was whether the claimed right to take an intake was supported by proven custom or constituted an unlawful appropriation of the lord's waste.
The critical research trap is assuming this term appears in American legal materials with the same meaning. It does not. Intakes in this technical sense are a creature of English customary land law and have no direct American counterpart. Any American legal document using the word "intake" almost certainly uses it in an administrative or regulatory sense entirely unrelated to manorial tenure.
Within the Law Mind corpus, intakes connect most directly to materials on commons law, customary tenure, copyhold, and the law of waste. Researchers pursuing the historical background of enclosure movements, common rights, and the gradual extinguishment of customary holdings through parliamentary enclosure acts will find intakes a relevant term for understanding the incremental, custom-sanctioned appropriations that preceded formal enclosure.
Note also that the term is plural by convention in the legal sources — the unit of analysis in the historical dictionaries is the practice generally, not a single enclosure event.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) give identical definitions, citing Charles Isaac Elton, Commons and Waste Lands (1868), at page 277. The consistency across editions reflects that this is a fixed historical term with no doctrinal evolution within the dictionary tradition — it did not expand, contract, or generate subcategories between editions. The Elton citation is to a recognized Victorian treatise on the law of commons and waste, and is a genuine and traceable source.
Neither edition provides case law, statutory references, or any indication that the term had active litigation significance at the time of publication. This suggests that by the late nineteenth century, intakes were already a term of historical legal interest rather than active practice, likely owing to the near-complete enclosure of English waste lands through parliamentary action during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the geographic variation in manorial custom that governed how intakes were authorized and for how long. Local custom was the controlling source of law, meaning that whether a particular intake was lawful depended entirely on the specific manor's established usage — a point that matters if a researcher is working with records from a specific locality and needs to assess the legal posture of a disputed enclosure.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English manorial law and has no recognized legal meaning in American, Canadian, or other common law jurisdictions outside England. Researchers should confine their use of the term's legal definition to English historical sources.