Definition
A Latin phrase from old English law meaning "marine increases." Maritima incrementa denotes lands gained from the sea — territory that accretes or emerges from tidal or coastal waters and becomes dry land. The term describes a category of land acquisition by natural process along the seacoast, historically relevant to questions of Crown ownership and the limits of royal prerogative over the foreshore and adjacent lands.
Common Confusion
Maritima incrementa is related to but distinct from alluvion. Alluvion (or alluvium) is the broader doctrine covering gradual land accumulation by the deposit of soil from any water source — rivers, lakes, or the sea. Maritima incrementa is the specifically maritime application: land gained from the sea rather than from inland waters. Bouvier directs readers from maritima incrementa straight to alluvion, which can obscure this distinction. Researchers should treat maritima incrementa as a subset of alluvion doctrine, not a synonym, and verify which body of water is involved before applying authorities interchangeably.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of art confined almost entirely to historical English legal writing. Researchers will not encounter it in modern statutes or contemporary case law; its appearance signals a source rooted in the common law of the sea, royal prerogative, or early property doctrine. The primary authority behind every historical dictionary entry is Sir Matthew Hale's De Jure Maris (On the Law of the Sea), particularly Part 1, Chapter 4 — a foundational treatise on the Crown's rights over tidal waters, the foreshore, and coastal land. Any research touching maritima incrementa will almost certainly require consulting Hale directly.
Two research traps are worth flagging. First, the doctrine operated within the English Crown prerogative framework: lands gained from the sea belonged to the Crown by default unless granted away. This premise does not translate automatically to American law, where coastal accretion rules are governed by state law and federal admiralty principles, without a monarchical prerogative foundation. Second, the Latin phrase itself may appear in variant forms or be paraphrased in period sources as "marine increases" or "lands gained from the sea" without using the Latin — researchers searching corpus materials should run both the Latin term and its English equivalents.
For corpus researchers working in the Law Mind collection, maritima incrementa connects directly to foreshore ownership, the doctrine of accretion, the distinction between tidal and non-tidal waters, and the broader question of what lands were historically subject to royal grant. It sits at the intersection of property law, admiralty, and constitutional history of Crown prerogative.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries are in agreement on the core definition: maritima incrementa means lands gained from the sea, a species of marine increase. All four cite or gesture toward Hale's De Jure Maris as the foundational authority. Burrill provides the most precise citation (Hale de Jur. Mar. pars 1, c. 4), which is consistent with Black's citation in both editions. Bouvier's entry is the most economical, simply defining the term and redirecting to alluvion — a useful signal that Bouvier treats the term as doctrinal shorthand rather than a standalone principle.
The second edition of Black's contains a garbled typographic rendering ("ed from the seu. 1, ec 4. In old Lands gainHule"), indicating a printing or transcription error in that edition. Researchers relying on the second edition should cross-check against the first edition or Burrill for the complete citation.
None of the historical dictionaries address the question of how this doctrine translated — or failed to translate — into American law after independence, nor do they discuss the treatment of accreted coastal land under state property regimes. That silence is itself informative: by the time American legal dictionaries were being compiled in the nineteenth century, maritima incrementa as a Latin term of art had largely been absorbed into the general law of accretion and foreshore rights, and the specifically English Crown-prerogative framing had become obsolete.
Jurisdictional Note
In English law, maritime accretion historically inured to the Crown. In the United States, no direct equivalent of Crown prerogative applies; coastal accretion questions are resolved under state property law, with some federal overlay in navigable and tidal waters. The term maritima incrementa as such has no operative role in American doctrine, though the underlying concept — gradual land gain from the sea — is addressed in state and federal cases on accretion and the public trust doctrine.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Accretion and Alluvion; Foreshore and Tidal Lands; Crown Prerogative in English Property Law.