Definition
A historical legal term denoting the right of grazing or pasturing cattle on land. Pasguage refers to either the act of grazing livestock on a given parcel or the legal entitlement to do so — functioning as a species of profit à prendre, the class of rights permitting a person to enter another's land and take something from it (here, the use of herbage for feeding animals).
In medieval and early modern English land law, pasguage appeared as a recognized right capable of being granted, reserved, or limited in conveyances and customs of manors. It was distinct from the land itself; the holder of pasguage rights did not hold a possessory interest in the soil but rather an incorporeal hereditament — a right appurtenant to land or held in gross.
---
Common Confusion
Pasguage, pasturage, and common of pasture are closely related but not identical concepts. Pasturage is the broader, more familiar term for the use of land to graze animals, and is sometimes used interchangeably with pasguage in historical sources. Common of pasture, however, is a specific common law right exercisable by commoners over another's land — typically regulated by custom or grant — and carries its own body of doctrine governing admeasurement and surcharging. A researcher encountering pasguage in a historical document should not automatically read it as implying common rights; it may describe a private grant rather than a customary entitlement shared among multiple holders.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Pasguage is an archaic term unlikely to appear in modern legal instruments or contemporary case law. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in:
— Medieval and early modern English land records, including manor court rolls, conveyances, and grants;
— Historical treatises on real property and incorporeal hereditaments;
— Glossaries and dictionaries of legal antiquities.
The principal research trap is terminological inconsistency. Historical sources are not uniform in distinguishing pasguage from pasturage, agistment, herbage, or common of pasture. A document using pasguage may intend a private profit à prendre, a customary right, or simply the physical act of grazing — context and the surrounding instrument are decisive.
Researchers working in Law Mind's corpus should search not only for pasguage itself but for variant spellings, which appear in Latin and Anglo-Norman forms across medieval records. The underlying legal concept — a right to graze animals on another's land — will often be discussed under pasturage, common of pasture, or profit à prendre in treatises and digests that do not index the term pasguage at all.
For English land law research, pasguage connects to the broader framework of manorial rights and incorporeal hereditaments. American law did not meaningfully receive this specific term; researchers working in U.S. sources should redirect to easement, profit à prendre, and grazing rights under public land law.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) defines pasguage tersely as "the grazing or pasturage of cattle," offering no further elaboration on the nature of the right, its limitations, or its relationship to adjacent doctrines. This minimal entry reflects the term's status as a historical curiosity rather than a term of active legal art even by the early twentieth century.
Historical sources collectively agree that pasguage belongs to the family of incorporeal hereditaments associated with the use of another's land for livestock. What the historical dictionaries do not adequately address is the functional overlap with agistment (the taking in of another's cattle for feed, often for payment) and herbage (the right to the grass or surface produce of land). These distinctions mattered in practice — particularly when disputes arose over the scope of a granted right — but the lexicographic record is thin. Researchers requiring doctrinal depth should turn to historical treatises on real property rather than relying on dictionary entries alone.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Pasguage as a distinct term is essentially confined to English legal history. American law absorbed the underlying concept through the doctrines of profit à prendre and easement, and through federal and state grazing rights frameworks, none of which use the term pasguage.
---