Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "to collect nuts." In historical legal usage, nuoes golligere referred to a customary right or privilege — formerly recognized in certain manorial and common-law contexts — permitting persons to gather nuts from land, typically woodland or waste, not their own. The right fell within the broader category of common rights exercised over another's land as a matter of established custom or grant.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears in the Law Mind corpus almost exclusively in historical and antiquarian legal sources. Researchers encountering it will most likely find it in discussions of customary rights, manorial law, or the classification of profits à prendre — the category of property rights that allows one party to take natural produce from another's land.
The Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) Supplemental entry is fragmentary, ending mid-sentence ("formerly one' at the works"), which signals that the source text was damaged, truncated, or imperfectly transcribed. Researchers should treat the Black's entry as an incomplete reference and seek corroboration in primary manorial records, treatises on English common rights, or historical surveys of customary tenure before drawing conclusions about the scope or legal character of the right.
The practical research trap here is over-reliance on the Black's entry as authoritative. Because the definition breaks off, it cannot be read as a complete statement of the right's legal elements or historical extent. Researchers working on enclosure history, common-land disputes, or the erosion of customary rights in English agrarian law will find this term most relevant to pre-enclosure manor court records and early modern treatises on common right, rather than to modern property doctrine, where the concept has no surviving independent legal life.
Jurisdictional note: This concept is rooted in English common law and manorial custom. It has no recognized counterpart in American property law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) Supplemental is the only identified shelf source carrying this entry, and that entry is incomplete. The truncated text — "formerly one' at the works" — is likely a corruption of a phrase describing the right as one of several customary works or seasonal privileges attached to manorial tenancy, but this cannot be confirmed from the surviving text alone.
Historical legal dictionaries treating related concepts — such as estovers, pannage, and common of mast — provide the most useful contextual framework for understanding nuoes golligere. Pannage, the right to gather mast (including nuts such as acorns and beechnuts) for swine, is the closest recognized cognate right in English manorial law and appears in standard historical dictionaries. The right to collect nuts for personal use would similarly have been classified as a profit à prendre or a customary easement running with tenure, not as a freehold interest.
No major historical legal dictionary — including Termes de la Ley, Cowell's Interpreter, or Bouvier's Law Dictionary — has been identified as containing a dedicated entry for nuoes golligere. Researchers should not assume the right was widely codified or frequently litigated; its absence from major dictionaries suggests it was a localized customary practice rather than a term of general legal art.
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