Definition
A Latin phrase used in historical English pleading, meaning "in a husbandlike manner" — that is, in the manner of a good husbandman, or according to the customary practices of sound agricultural management. The phrase appeared in pleadings, lease agreements, and related instruments to describe the standard of care a tenant was required to observe in cultivating and maintaining leased agricultural land. A tenant obligated to manage land more colonico was expected to farm it with the diligence, economy, and skill characteristic of a prudent and competent farmer.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The phrase has no current common usage in English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The phrase does not appear as ordinary English vocabulary.
Editorial note: The phrase is pure Latin legal terminology without any common-language counterpart. The nearest conceptual analog in plain English would be "in a farmerly manner" or "as a good farmer would." Because the phrase operates entirely within historical pleading convention and carries no divergent common meaning, the risk of confusion between lay and legal usage does not arise here. The difficulty for researchers is instead the unfamiliarity of the phrase itself and the now-obsolete agricultural standard it encodes.
Core Elements
The phrase imports a standard of conduct with three functional components as understood in historical pleading:
1. Customary husbandry practices: The tenant was to follow the agricultural customs prevailing in the locality — crop rotation, proper fallowing, maintenance of soil and drainage. Departure from local custom could itself constitute a failure to perform more colonico.
2. Prudent management: The standard was objective, measured against what a competent, prudent husbandman would do — not against the individual tenant's personal habits or intentions.
3. Preservation of the land's productive capacity: The underlying obligation was not merely to farm actively but to avoid waste or deterioration of the land's value, making the phrase functionally related to the law of waste in leasehold contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
More colonico is an archaism confined almost entirely to early English pleading forms and historical lease instruments. Researchers encountering this phrase will find it in:
— Declarations and pleas in actions for breach of agricultural leases, particularly from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, where landlords alleged a tenant had failed to cultivate more colonico.
— Form books and pleading treatises of the period. Townsend's Precedents of Pleading (cited consistently across all three source dictionaries as "Townsh. Pl. 198" or "Towns. Pl. 198") is the primary contemporary reference, and researchers should consult that work for specimen pleadings using the phrase.
— Closely related instruments: leases containing express covenants to use and manage land "in a husbandlike manner" — a phrase that appears in both Latin and vernacular English forms in agricultural lease practice.
The phrase matters navigationally because it can be easy to pass over as mere formulaic Latin without recognizing that it is doing legal work — establishing a standard of care, not merely decorating a pleading. In any action turning on whether a tenant breached a covenant of good husbandry, this phrase is likely the operative standard.
Researchers should also note that the phrase carries implicit jurisdictional and temporal content: "husbandlike manner" was calibrated to local agricultural custom, meaning the standard was not uniform across England and certainly not transplanted in identical form to colonial American or later common law jurisdictions. American agricultural lease cases from the nineteenth century sometimes use analogous English-language covenants without the Latin form, so corpus searches limited to the Latin phrase will undercount the relevant body of material.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill's — give virtually identical entries: the Latin phrase, its classification as a term of "old pleading," its English translation as "in husband-like manner," and a single citation to Townsend's Precedents of Pleading. The agreement across dictionaries is complete and the entries offer no substantive analysis beyond translation and classification.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any discussion of what the standard actually required, how courts measured compliance, or how the phrase related to covenants of good husbandry more broadly. The entries treat the phrase as a translation problem rather than a legal concept, which understates its functional significance in agricultural lease litigation. Researchers should treat the dictionary entries as locators rather than explanations and follow the Townsend citation for the operative context.
The minor orthographic variation between editions — "Townsh." in the two Black's editions versus "Towns." in Burrill — refers to the same work and should not be treated as a divergent citation.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase belongs to English common law pleading practice and appears with greatest frequency in English sources. American courts adopting English common law forms occasionally reproduced the Latin phrase in early lease instruments and pleadings, but vernacular English equivalents ("in a farmerlike manner," "in a husbandlike manner") became standard in American agricultural lease practice well before the Latin form fell entirely out of use.