Definition
Opentide refers to the period of the agricultural year following the harvest, specifically the time after corn (grain) has been carried out of the fields. During this period, arable land that had been closed to general use during the growing season was understood to revert to common or open use — allowing livestock to graze on stubble and remainders left after harvest. The term belongs to the law of common fields and agrarian custom, describing a seasonal transition in the rights of access and use that attached to agricultural land under open-field farming systems.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current entry. The term is archaic and does not appear in contemporary general usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not found as a discrete entry. "Open" and "tide" (meaning a season or period, as in Christmastide, Eastertide) were both in common use, and the compound form reflects the older sense of "tide" as a fixed or recurring interval of time.
The legal meaning of opentide is inseparable from its agrarian context. The word carries no meaningful existence in modern common usage; a researcher encountering it in historical documents should understand it not as a vague descriptor of open land, but as a term of agricultural custom with specific legal consequences for grazing rights and common entitlements.
Why It Matters in Research
Opentide is a term of manorial and agrarian law. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century sources — particularly in English materials relating to common fields, copyhold tenure, rights of common, and agrarian custom. It will rarely, if ever, appear in American legal sources, which did not inherit the open-field strip farming system that gave the term its functional meaning.
The key research trap is treating opentide as a simple descriptive phrase rather than a legally loaded term. In the context of open-field agriculture, the close of opentide and the beginning of the growing season (sometimes called the "haining" or "inclosure" of the fields) determined when individual proprietors could exclude others and when common rights of pasturage reattached. Documents that reference opentide are therefore implicitly addressing the allocation of common rights and the seasonal rhythm of field closure and opening.
Researchers working on enclosure disputes, manor court rolls, or common rights litigation should note that the duration and customary rules governing opentide varied by manor and by local agricultural practice. A grant, lease, or presentment that references rights "during opentide" or "after opentide" is invoking a body of local custom that must be traced through specific manorial records, not generalized rules.
Connections within the Law Mind corpus run primarily to: rights of common (especially common of pasture and common of shack), open-field systems, copyhold, and the law of enclosure. The term will surface in treatises on real property and agrarian tenure, particularly those treating medieval and early modern English land use.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence are entirely in agreement, reproducing the same single-sentence definition without elaboration: opentide is the time after corn is carried out of the fields. The consistency across dictionaries reflects that this was a settled term of limited scope — its meaning was not contested, and it required no extended treatment.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is the functional legal context. None of the three sources explains why the period mattered legally, what rights attached during it, or how it related to common field law. Researchers should treat these definitions as confirmatory identification, not as substantive analysis. For fuller treatment, the agrarian and manorial law literature — particularly works on common fields and copyhold — is necessary.
The use of "corn" in all three definitions should be read in its English legal and agricultural sense, meaning grain generally (wheat, rye, barley, oats), not maize. This is a consistent usage in English legal sources of the period and is not ambiguous within its historical context.
Jurisdictional Note
Opentide is a term of English agrarian and manorial custom. It has no practical application in American law and is unlikely to appear in Commonwealth jurisdictions that did not inherit the open-field system. Research use is confined to English legal history and historical property law materials.