Definition
Latin/Law Latin: "By the law of England." A phrase appearing in medieval and early common law texts to invoke the legal customs and rules of England as the governing authority for a proposition. In practice, the phrase functioned most commonly as a shorthand reference to the estate by the curtesy — the right of a husband to hold a life estate in his deceased wife's lands, recognized under English common law as a distinctively English legal institution.
The phrase operates both as a general attribution ("this rule obtains by the law of England") and, in specific pleading and treatise contexts, as a near-synonym for tenure by the curtesy of England (tenancy by the curtesy), which was itself sometimes styled an estate held per legem Angliae.
Common Confusion
PER LEGEM ANGLIAE vs. PER LEGEM TERRAE: These phrases are closely related but distinct. Per legem terrae — "by the law of the land" — is the broader and more constitutionally significant phrase, appearing in Magna Carta (Cap. 29, 9 Hen. III) as the foundation of due process protection against arbitrary dispossession. Per legem Angliae is narrower: it asserts the specific customs of England rather than the general concept of lawful process. Researchers working in constitutional and due process history should be careful not to conflate them; the per legem terrae lineage runs directly into modern due process doctrine, while per legem Angliae is largely a descriptor in property and tenure contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase surfaces almost exclusively in early common law treatises and Year Book-era materials. Researchers will encounter it primarily when working through texts on curtesy — the husband's life estate in the wife's freehold lands — where it appears as a formulaic attribution in Fleta, Bracton, and related sources. Its practical appearance in later digests and abridgments tends to be vestigial: compilers carried the phrase forward from medieval authorities without expanding its substance.
Two research traps to note. First, the phrase can cause confusion when a researcher encounters it in a general proposition about English law versus a specific reference to curtesy. Context from the surrounding text is essential — if the discussion concerns marriage, dower, or tenancy in freehold, the curtesy meaning is almost certainly intended. Second, because the phrase is Law Latin rather than technical common law English, it tends to disappear from post-Blackstone sources, which absorbed the underlying doctrine into plain-English discussions of curtesy without preserving the Latin tag. A search for per legem Angliae in later materials will produce sparse results even when the doctrine being discussed is fully present.
The phrase also serves as a useful corpus marker: its presence in a source reliably signals a text drawing on the Fleta-Bracton tradition or a compiler working from those sources. It is essentially absent from equity materials and from American legal sources except as a historical reference.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core definition concisely: "By the law of England; by the curtesy," with attribution to Fleta, lib. 2, c. 54, § 18. Burrill correctly collapses the two senses — general English law and curtesy specifically — without treating them as contradictory, which reflects how the phrase actually functions in the sources. The companion entry for per legem terrae, citing Magna Carta, is placed immediately adjacent in Burrill, reinforcing the importance of distinguishing the two phrases (see Common Confusion above).
Fleta, the late thirteenth-century legal treatise from which Burrill draws the citation, treats curtesy as a characteristic institution of English law distinguishable from comparable tenures elsewhere, which explains why the per legem Angliae formulation attached itself so persistently to that doctrine. The phrase effectively announced that the rule being stated was not universal common law but specifically English custom.
Older dictionaries that do not draw on the Fleta-Bracton tradition may omit this term entirely or subsume it under curtesy without preserving the Latin. Researchers relying solely on later American digest literature should cross-reference directly against the treatise tradition for full context.
Jurisdictional Note
Per legem Angliae as a live legal phrase is confined to English common law sources and their direct American colonial successors. Curtesy itself was received into American common law but was progressively abolished or modified by statute across U.S. jurisdictions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The phrase has no operative force in any modern jurisdiction.