Definition
Redditus (plural: redditus) is a Latin term from medieval English law meaning a rent, yield, or payment rendered by a tenant to a lord or other person entitled to receive it. The term encompasses any thing rendered, paid, or yielded under a tenure arrangement — most commonly a periodic money payment or service owed in connection with land-holding. In practice, redditus functioned as the core obligation that defined many tenurial relationships: the tenant held land, and the redditus was what flowed back to the grantor in exchange.
The concept is closely tied to the structure of feudal land tenure, where holding land "by render" (per redditionem) meant the tenant's obligation was expressed primarily in the form of a payment or yield rather than in personal military or ceremonial service. A landlord could grant away his right to receive a redditus and attorn the tenant to pay it to a third party — a mechanism that anticipates later doctrines of assignment of rent and the relationship between landlord and assignee.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Wiktionary does not carry a standard common English definition for redditus; the word has not passed into general modern usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not list redditus as an English word. The Latin root reddere (to give back, to render, to yield) underlies familiar English words such as render, surrender, and rendition.
Redditus is pure legal Latin that remained confined to formal legal writing and land records. Researchers encountering it in medieval or early modern instruments should resist reading it through the lens of modern "rent" alone — the term carried specific tenurial meaning that modern landlord-tenant vocabulary does not fully capture.
Common Confusion
Redditus is sometimes loosely treated as synonymous with reddendo, the gerund form of reddere appearing in conveyancing clauses ("reddendo inde annuatim" — rendering thence annually). The distinction matters: reddendo describes the act or obligation of rendering, while redditus names the thing rendered or the legal interest constituted by that obligation. Redditus is also distinct from a freehold fee-farm rent (feodi firma) and from a service rendered in kind (servicium), though all three could coexist in a single tenure arrangement. The broader category covering all these obligations is sometimes expressed as redditus et servitia — rents and services.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval English land records — plea rolls, cartularies, feet of fines, and inquisitions post mortem — will encounter redditus as a standard term of art. Several navigational points:
Indexing and searching. Because redditus is uninflected Latin, manuscript sources and early printed abridgments may index it under R for redditus, or under rent in English-language finding aids, or under tenure. A search limited to any single entry point will miss material.
Tenurial context is essential. Redditus appears across different tenure types with materially different legal consequences. A redditus attached to socage tenure operated differently from a redditus reserved on a fee-farm grant. Reading redditus as a generic synonym for modern "rent" collapses distinctions that were legally operative at the time the document was created.
Attornment clauses. The Burrill excerpt references the landlord's power to grant a redditus to a third party and attorn the tenant to pay it to the new grantee. This is an early articulation of what becomes the doctrine governing rent service, rent charge, and rent seek — distinctions that later became significant in pleading. Researchers tracing the history of these rent categories should anchor analysis at redditus before moving forward into the common law categories.
Corpus connections. Redditus appears frequently alongside tenure terms (tenens, feoffatus, seisin), rent-related terms (annuus redditus, redditus assisae), and conveyancing terms (reddendo, attornment). A corpus search for redditus in isolation will underperform; paired searches with these associated terms recover more representative usage.
Latin-language sources pre-1300. English legal records from the Norman Conquest through the late thirteenth century were drafted predominantly in Latin. Redditus in this period may appear without the explanatory English gloss that later bilingual records provide. Facility with medieval Latin abbreviations is often necessary to read these entries correctly in manuscript.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary definitional entry available in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill correctly identifies redditus as meaning rent, payment, and thing rendered, and correctly roots it in the Latin reddere. The illustrative Latin passage Burrill quotes — dealing with a tenant rendering a redditus and the lord's power to grant that redditus and attorn the tenant to the new grantee — is drawn from the tradition of medieval common law learning, consistent with treatments found in Bracton and Littleton, though Burrill does not cite those sources explicitly in the excerpt provided.
What Burrill's entry does not supply: any distinction among the recognized species of rent (rent service, rent charge, rent seek) that medieval and early modern common law drew from the general concept of redditus, nor any treatment of redditus assisae (the assize rent, a fixed customary rent), which appears throughout manorial records and is a practically important subspecies. Researchers should not treat Burrill's brief entry as exhaustive of the term's range in primary sources.
No other Law Mind corpus dictionary source covers redditus as a primary entry. For the fuller doctrinal elaboration, the natural next steps in the corpus are encyclopedia and treatise materials dealing with rent and feudal tenure.
Jurisdictional Note
Redditus is a term of English legal history and applies principally to the law of England as it developed under the feudal tenure system. Its practical relevance to American law is historical only — feudal tenures were largely abolished in the American colonies and states — but the concept underlies common law rent doctrine that American courts inherited and sometimes still cite.