Definition
In old English law, a "going from" or "going off or out of land." The term denotes departure or withdrawal from a place, most commonly land. It appears principally in conveyancing and property formulas, typically paired with its complement *accessus* (approach or access), to describe the full liberty of coming onto and departing from a parcel of land. The phrase *cum libero accessu et recessu* — with free access and recess — was a standard expression in medieval conveyances granting unrestricted ingress and egress.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not a current English word in ordinary use; *recess* (the anglicized descendant) carries meanings including a temporary pause or adjournment, a recessed space or alcove, and a break in legislative or judicial proceedings.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): *Recess* — a withdrawing or retiring; a going back; also a place of retirement or seclusion; in legislative contexts, a temporary suspension of business.
The legal Latin *recessus* is the root from which the English *recess* descends, and the core sense of "going back" or "withdrawal" survives in the modern word. However, the legal Latin term carries a specific technical meaning tied to land and property rights — the liberty to depart from land — that is entirely absent from the modern English word's common usage. A researcher encountering *recessus* in a medieval document should not read into it any sense of a pause in proceedings or a spatial alcove.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early common law sources, particularly Bracton and medieval conveyancing records, will encounter *recessus* as part of the fixed formula *cum libero accessu et recessu*. This phrase functions as a term of art for what modern law would call a right of ingress and egress, and it may appear in grants of easements, rights of way, or common appurtenant to land. Recognizing the formula is essential; treating either component word in isolation, or reading *recessus* through the lens of its modern English descendant, will produce a misreading of the document.
The primary research trap is the apparent familiarity of the anglicized form. Because *recess* is a common English word, researchers may assume they understand the Latin *recessus* without pausing to locate it in its proper property-law context. The word signals nothing about adjournment, architecture, or pause; it signals only departure from land, and always in tandem with the right of access.
This term belongs to a broader class of paired Latin property formulas in medieval English law — entry and exit, giving and granting, to have and to hold — where the legal effect depends on reading both halves of the couplet together. The *accessus/recessus* pairing is the ingress/egress formula in its Latin dress.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source available for this term, and its entry is brief but precise. Burrill correctly identifies *recessus* as an old English law term meaning a going from or going off or out of land, roots it in the Latin *recedere* (to go back), and illustrates it with the standard conveyancing phrase *cum libero accessu et recessu* with a citation to Bracton, *De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae*, folio 231b.
The Bracton reference is significant. Bracton's treatise, composed in the mid-thirteenth century, is among the foundational texts of the common law, and the formula *cum libero accessu et recessu* appearing there confirms that this usage was well established in classical English legal Latin. Burrill offers nothing beyond the phrase and its gloss, which reflects the term's limited and formulaic function: *recessus* is not a term that generated elaborate doctrinal commentary but rather a fixed piece of drafting vocabulary whose meaning was taken as self-evident by practitioners of the period.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus covers this term, and no modern legal dictionaries treat it as a live term. It is, in practical terms, an archival term — encountered only in historical documents and the scholarship that interprets them.
Jurisdictional Note
*Recessus* is a term of medieval English law with no direct application in any modern jurisdiction as a live legal concept. Researchers encountering it will do so exclusively in the context of English common law before the displacement of Law Latin from legal drafting, principally in records predating the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730, which required English in most English legal proceedings.