Definition
An archaic legal term denoting issues or profits arising from or out of a thing. The term appears in historical English law as a descriptor for yields, rents, or returns produced by property or an estate — the fruits or proceeds that flow from a given subject matter.
Note on adjacent term: The historical dictionaries appended to PELES the related entry PELFE (or PELFRE), a distinct term meaning booty or plunder, and also the personal effects of a convicted felon forfeited upon conviction. Though treated adjacently in the sources, PELES and PELFE are separate concepts and should not be conflated.
Common Confusion
PELES and PELFE are recorded in close proximity in the historical dictionaries and are occasionally treated as variants of one another, but they carry different meanings. PELES refers to issues or profits arising from a thing — an economic or property concept. PELFE (or PELFRE) refers to booty or to the personal goods of a felon convict — a concept rooted in forfeiture and criminal law. The proximity of the entries in Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence may mislead a researcher scanning historical sources into treating them as synonymous.
Why It Matters in Research
PELES is a term of limited practical circulation. It does not appear in modern legal usage and is not found in contemporary statutory or case law contexts. Researchers are most likely to encounter it when working through historical English legal sources, glossaries of law French or law Latin, or early common law treatises and records dealing with property yields and manorial rights.
The term's significance is almost entirely documentary: it signals the kind of archaic vocabulary that appears in pre-nineteenth-century English legal instruments and requires careful attention to context. A researcher reading historical property records or estate documents who encounters PELES should understand it as a reference to the productive output of a property interest, not to ownership or title itself.
The pairing with PELFE in the source dictionaries is itself a research trap. Both terms appear on the same dictionary entry line in Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and in Rapalje & Lawrence, formatted in a way that could suggest they are related in meaning. They are not. A researcher following cross-references between these terms should treat them as independent entries that happen to share alphabetical proximity.
Because neither term survived into modern legal vocabulary in any active sense, their appearance in a historical document is a strong indicator that the document predates or draws from early English common law sources. This can be useful as a dating or provenance signal when working with undated manuscripts or copied instruments.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Rapalje & Lawrence — provide identical or near-identical entries for PELES, each citing Jacob (Giles Jacob, A New Law Dictionary) as authority. The entry in all three reads: "Issues arising from or out of a thing." No further elaboration is offered in any of the three sources.
This unanimity reflects the derivative nature of these dictionaries with respect to archaic terms: all three drew from the same earlier glossary tradition, and none adds independent analysis or example. The entry for PELFE similarly cites Cowell (John Cowell, The Interpreter) across all three dictionaries without variation.
The brevity of the treatment in all sources underscores that PELES had no living legal significance by the time these dictionaries were compiled. Researchers should not expect to find expanded treatment of this term in the standard secondary literature; it exists in these dictionaries essentially as a preservation artifact of earlier glossary work.