Definition
In old English law, a flowing back; the return or reflux of water. The term appears in medieval legal Latin in the context of water rights and the physical behavior of water courses, referring to the backward or reverse movement of water — as when tidal water flows back from land, or when water returns through a channel or sluice after having advanced.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering refullum in historical English legal records or treatises should treat it as a term of art within the medieval law of water rights, mill rights, and riparian obligations. It surfaces in contexts involving the duties and liabilities of landowners or mill operators whose water infrastructure caused water to back up or reflux onto neighboring land — a precursor to modern nuisance and riparian injury doctrine.
The term is essentially extinct in modern legal usage. A researcher who finds it in manuscript sources, plea rolls, or early printed treatises should look immediately to the surrounding context for water management disputes: mill dams, sluices, tidal boundaries, or drainage obligations. It will not appear in modern statutes or case law, and searching for it in post-seventeenth-century sources will yield nothing.
Because refullum is cited in Fleta — a treatise composed circa 1290 — its appearance in a source fixes the document's subject matter within the Anglo-Norman law of real property and water, not admiralty or commercial contexts where "reflux" language might otherwise appear. Fleta is itself a derivative of Bracton, so researchers working backward from Fleta citations should cross-reference Bracton's treatment of water rights for fuller doctrinal context.
No direct American legal equivalent exists. The concept maps roughly onto the modern idea of a backwater easement or a claim for flooding caused by obstruction, but those modern doctrines arrived through equity and common law nuisance, not through the specific Latin terminology of refullum.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary entry of substance, defining refullum simply as "a flowing back" and citing Fleta, lib. 4, c. 27, § 4 as the authority. The entry is brief because the term's legal life was narrow: it belonged to a specific technical vocabulary of medieval water law that did not survive into the common law's subsequent development in either England or America.
No other historical dictionaries in standard legal use — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Black's early editions — carry an independent entry for refullum, which itself signals how quickly the term passed out of active legal vocabulary. Burrill's inclusion is characteristic of his broader project of recovering Latin and Law French terms from medieval sources; the citation to Fleta is the primary anchor and should be consulted directly for any serious research use.
The absence of this term from later dictionaries is not an oversight — it reflects the transition away from Law Latin pleading forms in English courts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Researchers should not infer from silence in later sources that the concept disappeared; the underlying legal problem (water backing up onto land due to a neighbor's works) persisted and was addressed through common law forms that no longer required the Latin term.