Definition
Pollengers are trees that have been lopped — that is, trees from which branches have been cut — as distinguished from timber-trees, which are trees standing in their full, uncut condition and valued for their wood. The term identifies a specific category of tree as altered by human management, a distinction that carried legal significance in the context of property rights, waste, and the conveyance of land and its appurtenances under the common law.
Why It Matters in Research
Pollengers appears almost exclusively in historical property law contexts, particularly in disputes over waste, the rights of life tenants, and the scope of what was conveyed when land changed hands. Researchers encountering this term in early English legal materials — cases, conveyances, and treatises predating the nineteenth century — should understand that the lopped/timber distinction was legally operative: different rules governed what a tenant could do with timber-trees versus pollengers, and unauthorized cutting of timber could constitute actionable waste while management of pollengers might fall within permissible husbandry.
The sole cited authority across both dictionary sources is Plowden's Commentaries (Plowd. 649), Edmund Plowden's sixteenth-century reports of cases argued in the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth I. This places the term squarely in the early modern English common law tradition. Researchers should not expect to find pollengers as a live legal category in American case law or modern statutes; the term surfaces in historical sources and in any research tracing the genealogy of waste doctrine or the law of fixtures and appurtenances.
A notable trap in the Black's Law Dictionary source text: the first-edition entry contains an editorial corruption, inserting language about political, judicial, and ministerial offices mid-definition — text that plainly belongs to a different entry entirely. The second-edition supplemental entry corrects this and offers the clean, accurate definition. Researchers relying on the first-edition Black's text for this term should disregard the interpolated material.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary sources agree on the substance: pollengers are lopped trees, distinguished from timber-trees, with Plowden's Commentaries as the authority. The second-edition supplemental entry is the cleaner and more reliable text, correcting the first edition's garbled inclusion of unrelated material on classes of public office.
The Plowden citation (Plowd. 649) is the anchor for this term in the historical record. Plowden's Commentaries, first published in 1571 and expanded in 1578, are a recognized and authoritative source for Tudor-era common law reasoning. Historical dictionaries beyond Black's do not appear to have developed this term further, suggesting it was already receding from active legal vocabulary by the time systematic legal lexicography emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
What the historical sources do not supply is any detailed doctrinal framework: there is no elaboration in the dictionary entries on exactly which legal consequences flowed from the pollenger/timber-tree distinction, how courts resolved boundary cases, or whether the category extended to specific species or cutting methods. Researchers requiring that level of detail must go to the primary source — Plowden himself — and to treatises on waste such as those by Coke or later commentators.
Jurisdictional Note
Pollengers is a term of English common law origin with no recognized foothold in American statutory or case law. Researchers working in American legal history may encounter it in colonial-era documents or in treatises that imported English property law wholesale, but it carries no operative legal meaning in any current American jurisdiction.