Definition
Pastura is a Latin legal term from old English law denoting pasture, the act of feeding animals on land, or a legal right to feed animals upon another's land. The term encompasses more than the modern understanding of pasture as grass-covered ground. In its historical usage, pastura included the full range of animal feeding on land: grazing on grass, feeding on acorns and mast (the fallen fruit of forest trees), browsing on leaves and twigs, and other forms of forage. The right of pastura could exist as an independent legal interest in land, entitling the holder to bring animals onto another's property for sustenance.
Common Confusion
Pastura is sometimes treated as synonymous with communia pasturae (common of pasture), but the terms are not identical. Pastura is the broader concept — the feeding right or the land itself — while communia pasturae is a specific form: a common right of pasture shared among multiple holders, typically appurtenant to particular tenements. A right of pastura could be private and exclusive; communia pasturae is by definition shared. Researchers moving between these terms in medieval and early modern sources should treat them as related but distinct.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal texts, particularly in the treatise literature of Bracton and Fleta. Researchers encountering pastura in primary sources should recognize several things.
First, the scope of the right is broader than the modern word "pasture" implies. A grant or dispute concerning pastura may involve not just grazing land but woodland feeding rights — rights to pannage (acorn and mast feeding) and browsing — which in modern law would be classified separately or described under distinct terminology. Collapsing pastura to its modern English cognate will cause researchers to misread the scope of historical grants and pleadings.
Second, pastura functions in the sources both as an abstract right and as a physical place. Context determines which sense governs. A grant of pastura over specific land conveys a right; a reference to a pastura as a bounded piece of ground refers to the land itself.
Third, the term connects directly to the law of common rights, which was extensively litigated in medieval English courts and continued to generate legal disputes through the enclosure era. Researchers working on common land, manorial records, or enclosure disputes will encounter pastura in source documents and need to trace how the underlying right was characterized and transferred.
Fourth, because this is Latin law French terminology, variant spellings and abbreviated forms appear in manuscript sources. Pashura, pasture, and pasturia may appear in anglicized or corrupted forms in later records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most direct treatment of this term available in the historical shelf. Burrill derives pastura from the Latin pastus (a feeding) and pascere (to feed), grounds the definition in Bracton (fol. 222b) and Fleta (lib. 4, c. 19, §5), and explicitly flags that the term was not confined to grass-feeding in the modern sense but extended to acorns, mast, and browsing. This is the critical gloss — it corrects the anachronistic reading that a modern researcher might otherwise import from the English word "pasture."
Burrill's entry appears to have been truncated in the surviving source material, cutting off mid-sentence after noting that pastura could refer to a pasture as a physical place. The full entry likely continued with discussion of the right's characteristics, its relationship to common of pasture, and possibly its role in pleading. Researchers should consult the full Burrill entry directly and supplement with Bracton and Fleta as the primary sources Burrill himself cites.
No entry for pastura appears in the other major historical dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's early editions, Tomlin's), reflecting the term's status as specialized medieval Latin legal vocabulary rather than working common law terminology by the nineteenth century. By that period, English law had substantially replaced the Latin terminology with the anglicized "common of pasture" and related phrases.
Jurisdictional Note
Pastura is a term of English legal history with no direct counterpart in American law. It may appear in colonial-era grants derived from English common rights traditions, particularly in New England town common arrangements, but American courts generally translated such rights into English-language equivalents early in the republic. Researchers in Scottish, Irish, or Welsh legal history will encounter related but not identical terminology rooted in distinct land tenure traditions.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Pasture Rights
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Land and Common Rights
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Bracton and the Treatise Tradition