Definition
In old law French usage, *lees* means a lease — a grant of possession of lands or tenements for a term. The term appears in early English legal records as an archaic alternative form for what modern law calls a lease.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "lee" — the sheltered side away from the wind; or, informally, dregs or sediment settling at the bottom of a liquid.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Dregs. See 2d Lee." — referring to sediment or the sheltered side of a vessel or landmass.
The gap here is total. The common English word "lees" carries no legal freight whatsoever. A researcher encountering "lees" in a legal document is looking at a term of art from Law French — a lease — that shares nothing but spelling with the ordinary English word for sediment or shelter.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a trap for the unwary precisely because of its common-language homonym. A researcher scanning an early English legal document — a Britton manuscript, a Year Book, a plea roll — and encountering "lees" might pass right over it or misread it as a scribal oddity or reference to physical surroundings. It is neither. It is a lease.
The term belongs to the body of Law French terminology that pervades English legal records from the Norman Conquest through the early modern period. Law French persisted in English courts long after it ceased to be a living language, surviving as a technical vocabulary in pleadings, writs, and treatises well into the seventeenth century. In that environment, archaic forms like *lees* coexist with Latin and early English glosses, making terminological precision essential.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note that this term will appear almost exclusively in sources engaging with pre-modern English law — Britton especially, which is the source Burrill cites. Britton (c. 1290) is an early Anglo-French legal treatise presenting English common law in the voice of the king; its chapters on land tenure and leasehold use Law French throughout. The chapter references Burrill supplies (cc. 34, 42, 47, 114) point to Britton's treatment of real property conveyances, and *lees* there functions exactly as "lease" functions in modern property law discourse.
Do not expect to find this spelling in post-seventeenth-century legal texts. By the time English replaced Law French in legal proceedings, the term had been supplanted entirely by "lease" in its anglicized form.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary — and here, the only — dictionary source. His entry is compact: he identifies the term as Law French, traces it to *lesser* (to let), defines it as "a lease," and cites Britton. That is the full extent of the historical lexicographic record in the Law Mind corpus for this term.
The entry does useful work for its brevity. By flagging the Law French origin and the specific Britton citations, Burrill gives researchers both the linguistic context and the primary source anchor needed to pursue the term further. What Burrill does not do — and cannot reasonably be expected to do — is trace the term's relationship to the broader vocabulary of leasehold: *lessee*, *lessor*, *demise*, *dimission*, all of which appear in the same legal universe and often alongside *lees* in the same documents.
The phrase "Lees et dimissions" cited from Britton is itself instructive: it pairs the lease (*lees*) with the act of granting or surrendering possession (*dimissions*, from Law French *dimission*, a letting go or release). This coupling was conventional in early conveyancing language and signals that *lees* was used in formulaic, not incidental, contexts.
Jurisdictional Note
As a Law French archaism, *lees* has no modern jurisdictional variation — it does not appear in contemporary statutes or case law in any common law jurisdiction. Its relevance is confined to historical English law and documents predating the formal displacement of Law French from English legal proceedings.