Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning "profit." Used in legal instruments, writs, and treatises to denote the profits or issues arising from land or other property. The term appears both in the singular (proficuum) and plural (proficua), and was employed in formal legal Latin to describe the financial returns or yields from an asset, most commonly land.
The phrase proficuum terræ refers specifically to the profit of land. The phrase cum proficuo exituum means "with the profit of the issues" — a formulation appearing in contexts where a grant, writ, or legal proceeding carried with it an entitlement to any income generated by the property in question.
Common Language
This is pure legal Latin jargon with no meaningful common-language counterpart in modern English. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal records — plea rolls, original writs, Bracton-era treatises, and later abridgments — will encounter proficuum and proficua as standard vocabulary for what modern sources would simply call profits, income, issues, or rents from land. Misreading or overlooking these terms can cause a researcher to miss the financial dimension of a grant, judgment, or writ.
The critical navigational point is the relationship between proficuum and the broader cluster of medieval property-income terms: issues, profits, rents, and revenues often appear in overlapping formulations. Proficua as used in Bracton (fol. 49) and in Hale's Analysis operates at a high level of generality, covering the yield of an estate without distinguishing among its components. Later common law sources, by the eighteenth century, had largely displaced the Latin forms with English equivalents, so the term largely disappears from practical legal writing after the medieval and early modern periods.
When tracing a property right or damages claim backward through historical sources, the appearance of cum proficuo exituum in a writ signals that the claimant was entitled not just to possession but to the accumulated income of the property during the period of dispossession. This matters for understanding the scope of relief available in early English real actions and the calculation of what would later be called mesne profits.
The term is also a marker of source type: its presence almost certainly places a document within the medieval or early modern Latin legal tradition rather than later English-language materials. Researchers using Law Mind sources that span multiple centuries should treat proficuum as a flag for documents requiring Latin-legal reading competency.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source with an entry for this term, and its treatment is appropriately compact: a direct gloss ("profit"), illustration of the key phrases, and citations to Registrum Originale, Fleta, Bracton, Hale's Analysis, and the English law reporters. These citations anchor the term solidly in the authoritative medieval legal literature.
No significant divergence exists among historical dictionary sources because the term is narrowly technical and did not evolve meaningfully in meaning — it entered English legal Latin with a fixed sense and exited use without transformation. What Burrill does not supply, and what researchers should note, is any discussion of how proficuum relates to the later English doctrines of waste, mesne profits, or the accounting for rents and profits in equity proceedings. Those connections must be traced through the substantive authorities cited rather than through the dictionary entry itself.
The citation to 3 Man. Gr. & Scott, 92 (Manning, Granger & Scott, i.e., the Common Bench Reports) suggests the term survived in formal pleading language into the nineteenth century, at least vestigially, even as English had long since supplanted Latin in ordinary legal discourse.