Definition
A Latin legal phrase meaning "rising up and lying down." In its primary legal application, the term describes cattle that have been on another person's land long enough to have lain down and risen again — signifying a sufficient period of trespassory grazing to give rise to a right of distress or impoundment by the landowner. The phrase served as a threshold of presence: mere momentary straying was insufficient; the animals had to have settled, fed, and remained.
In a secondary and older application, the phrase was used by Bracton to describe villeins who actually resided on their lord's estate, denoting continuous habitation through the same metaphor of daily rising and lying down.
Common Confusion
Levantes et cubantes is the Latin form. The Anglo-French equivalent, levant et couchant, appears in common law sources with equal or greater frequency and refers to the same legal concept. Researchers should search both forms when working across Latin, Law French, and English legal texts. Some secondary authorities render the phrase as levantia et cubantia (from Vaughan's Reports), and a researcher relying solely on one spelling may miss relevant material. The terms are interchangeable in legal meaning; the variation is orthographic and linguistic, not substantive.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical sources dealing with two distinct subject matters: the law of distress and impoundment of stray animals, and the feudal law of villeinage. Researchers should be alert to this dual context when tracing the phrase through Bracton, Blackstone, and the reports.
For animal trespass and distress research, the phrase marks the doctrinal line between a transient intrusion and actionable trespass by cattle. Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 9) is the standard citation anchor, and most dictionary sources trace directly to that passage. When reading earlier Year Book material or Bracton, the cattle-law sense and the villeinage sense may appear in close proximity, creating potential for contextual confusion if the researcher is not alert to which body of law is in view.
For villeinage research, Bracton's use of the phrase (fol. 6b) to describe serfs actually dwelling on the demesne carries a different legal weight — it is a descriptor of status through physical presence, not a threshold for tortious liability. The Burrill entry is the most useful of the historical dictionaries here because it is the only one that preserves this second meaning.
The variant form levantia et cubantia, cited to Vaughan's Reports at 252, is worth noting for corpus searches. Vaughan's Reports (Sir Richard Vaughan, C.J., reports from the 1660s–1670s) are a legitimate early modern source, and researchers using the Law Mind corpus should run searches on all three Latin forms plus the Anglo-French equivalent to achieve full coverage.
Because this is archaic law with no modern statutory counterpart, the phrase is unlikely to appear in post-19th century case law except in historical legal scholarship. Research use is almost entirely retrospective.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries converge on the core definition — cattle present on land long enough to have lain down and risen — and all cite Blackstone as the authority. Black's 1st and 2nd editions are nearly identical in their entries, with Black's 2nd adding the identification of levant et couchant as the Latin equivalent (though levant et couchant is properly Anglo-French, not Latin — a minor imprecision in the source).
Burrill is the most substantive of the three entries. It adds the Bracton reference for the villeinage application, preserves the variant form levantia et cubantia from Vaughan, and directs the reader to the levant et couchant entry for fuller treatment. Researchers relying solely on Black's will miss the villeinage dimension entirely.
None of the historical dictionaries discuss the practical operation of the distress rule in detail — how long "levant et couchant" was understood to require in practice — which must be traced through the common law reports and Blackstone's surrounding text rather than the dictionary entries alone.
Jurisdictional Note
This is a common law term rooted in English feudal and agrarian law. It has no direct counterpart in civil law systems. American jurisdictions that inherited English common law on animal trespass may carry doctrinal traces, but the Latin phrase itself is unlikely to appear in American sources outside of historical treatises or law review scholarship.