Definition
A Law French term meaning "recovered" or "reobtained." Used in early English legal texts to describe property, rights, or possessions that had been retaken or restored to a prior holder after loss or dispossession. The term appears in pleading and procedural contexts associated with actions for recovery of land or goods.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal sources will encounter reconquis in plea rolls, Year Books, and early treatises where Law French remained the operative language of the courts. Its significance is primarily diagnostic: the word signals that a text is addressing the outcome of a recovery action, not the initiation of one. Because Law French terms of this kind were often left untranslated or inconsistently rendered in later English abridgments and digests, a researcher who encounters only the English gloss ("recovered") in a secondary source may miss the technical procedural weight the original term carried in its native context.
The term is narrow in scope and appears to have had no independent doctrinal life beyond its use as a past-participial descriptor in pleading. It does not name a distinct cause of action or legal concept. Its value to the researcher is therefore philological and contextual rather than substantive: it helps date and situate a source, confirms the stage of proceedings being described, and connects the passage to the broader vocabulary of real property recovery in the Anglo-Norman legal tradition.
Corpus connections: Reconquis belongs to the same cluster of Law French participial terms—including rendu (rendered), trouvé (found), and livré (delivered)—that appear throughout Britton and similar early compilations as shorthand markers of procedural outcomes. Familiarity with this vocabulary is essential for reading thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English legal texts in the original.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among the shelf sources: "L. Fr. Recovered; reobtained. Britt. c. 59." The citation to Britton, chapter 59, anchors the term to one of the foundational thirteenth-century English legal compilations, written in Law French and attributed (though not with certainty) to John le Breton. Burrill offers nothing beyond the gloss and citation, which is consistent with his treatment of terminal Law French vocabulary throughout the dictionary—such terms are catalogued but not analyzed, on the reasonable assumption that their function is self-evident once translated.
No other shelf source addresses reconquis, which reflects its status as a term of linguistic record rather than legal doctrine. Researchers should not expect to find extended treatment in Bouvier, Black, or similar common law dictionaries compiled after Law French had ceased to function as a working legal language.
Jurisdictional Note
Reconquis is a term of English legal history, not of any modern jurisdiction. It has no operative role in contemporary common law practice and does not appear in the law of any jurisdiction as a live term of art.