Definition
A writ in the old English common law system that lay against a person who entered into lands following the death of a limited tenant — such as a tenant in dower or a tenant for life — and wrongfully withheld possession from the person entitled in reversion or remainder. In effect, the writ provided a remedy for the reversioner or remainderman against a disseisor who took advantage of the gap created by the termination of a limited freehold estate. The writ operated as a form of real action designed to restore the proper successor to seisin of the land.
Why It Matters in Research
INTENTIONE is a term of exclusively historical significance, encountered only in research touching on the medieval and early modern English real property system. Researchers should treat it as a marker pointing toward the law of limited freehold estates — dower, life estates, and the mechanics of reversion and remainder — rather than as a doctrine with any continuing practical life. The writ belongs to the category of abolished real actions, swept away in England in the nineteenth century by the reforms that ended the old forms of action and consolidated real property remedies.
Because the term appears in Latin form and without detailed exposition in most historical dictionaries, researchers relying solely on secondary digests may mistake it for a general writ of entry or confuse it with other real actions addressing wrongful possession. The reference to Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium (F.N.B. 203) — cited consistently across all four source dictionaries — is the authoritative historical source and the appropriate next stop for any researcher needing procedural detail. That citation is reliable and consistent across sources, which is unusual enough to note: it signals that the compilers of each dictionary were drawing from the same primary root.
The writ's specific scope — triggered by entry after the death of a limited tenant — distinguishes it from broader writs of entry that addressed other disseisin scenarios. Researchers working on questions of remainder and reversion, the devolution of seisin, or the vulnerability of remaindermen during the interval between a limited tenant's death and actual entry by the person entitled should identify INTENTIONE as the specific procedural vehicle available in that gap period.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries offer definitions that are functionally identical, reproducing the same underlying description with only minor textual variation. Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier all cite Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium at page 203 as the primary authority. This uniformity reflects the derivative nature of these dictionary entries: none of the compilers elaborated beyond a one-sentence description, and none supplies procedural detail about how the writ was prosecuted, what defenses were available, or how it related to other real actions in the same family. Bouvier adds no supplementary analysis of INTENTIONE itself, though that dictionary's entries for surrounding terms (INTER, INTER ALIA, INTER ALIOS) appear to reflect an alphabetical grouping convention in the original rather than any conceptual linkage. Rapalje & Lawrence makes the same alphabetical compression explicit, appending the entry for INTER immediately after INTENTIONE without transition. Researchers should not read interpretive significance into that proximity.
No source dictionary addresses the writ's relationship to the broader system of real actions, its procedural requirements, or the historical circumstances of its abolition. For that context, Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium itself, or secondary treatments of English real property history such as Maitland's writings on the forms of action, are more informative sources than any of the dictionaries here.
Jurisdictional Note
INTENTIONE was a writ of English origin and never had a counterpart in American law. American jurisdictions did not receive the full system of English real actions, and the specific procedural architecture that gave rise to this writ — including the complex law of seisin and limited freehold tenures — was not transplanted in its technical form. Researchers encountering this term in American legal sources will find it only in historical dictionaries or in scholarship tracing the English roots of American real property law.