Definition
Jus secandi (Latin: "right of cutting") is a term from old English property law denoting a right to cut or harvest crops, grass, or other produce growing on another's land. It appears in the context of profits à prendre — incorporeal hereditaments granting the holder a right to enter another's land and take some part of its natural produce. Jus secandi specifically captures the cutting or mowing element of such rights, as distinct from rights of pasture, piscary, or turbary.
Common Confusion
Jus secandi is sometimes loosely equated with the broader category of profits à prendre, but it describes one specific mode of exercise — the act of cutting — rather than the overarching property right. A right of estovers (cutting wood for fuel or repair) is a related but distinct concept. Researchers should not assume jus secandi encompasses rights of digging, grazing, or fishing, which carry their own terminology.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical English sources treating incorporeal hereditaments and the law of real property as it stood before modern statutory consolidation. Its practical significance lies in interpreting medieval and early modern conveyances, manor records, and ecclesiastical documents that granted cutting rights over meadows, marshes, or common lands.
The key research trap: the term is narrow and technical, and most secondary sources will not index it directly. Researchers encountering jus secandi in a primary source should approach it through the broader doctrine of profits à prendre in period treatises — Fleta, Bracton, and later Blackstone's Commentaries on incorporeal hereditaments — rather than expecting standalone treatment in most dictionaries or digests. The Fleta reference in Burrill points to lib. 4, c. 27, § 1, which is the primary locus for this term in the classical sources.
Modern English property law has largely absorbed such granular Latin terminology into statutory and common-law frameworks governing easements and profits, making jus secandi itself a term of historical rather than active legal use. Researchers working in land registration records, enclosure award documents, or tithe commutation materials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may encounter surviving references.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive treatment among the shelf sources, and its entry is spare: a Latin gloss, a classification as old English law, and a single citation to Fleta. This brevity is telling. Even among historical legal dictionaries, jus secandi was treated as a term sufficiently self-explanatory within its Latin roots and sufficiently narrow in application that extended treatment was unnecessary.
What the historical sources miss is any sustained doctrinal development. The right of cutting never generated the volume of litigation or commentary that rights of common pasture or estovers did, likely because its scope was less prone to boundary disputes and more easily defined by the physical act of harvest. Researchers should not read the sparse dictionary treatment as indicating an undeveloped legal concept — rather, the right was absorbed within the well-settled law of profits and rarely required separate articulation.
Jurisdictional Note
Jus secandi is a term rooted in English common law and its historical application is essentially confined to England and Wales. American property law inherited the broader doctrine of profits à prendre but the Latin terminology, including jus secandi, did not carry forward into American usage in any significant way.