Definition
A Latin term from the civil law denoting the balance or remainder of a debt that a person owes upon the settlement or liquidation of an account — the residual sum left unpaid after accounts have been balanced. It represents an arrear: the amount still outstanding once credits have been applied against debits and a final reckoning has been made.
The associated term reliquary (sometimes reliquatary) refers to the debtor of a reliqua — that is, the person who owes the remaining balance, particularly one who satisfies a debt only in installments or piecemeal rather than in full.
Common Confusion
Reliqua should not be confused with its near-homophone reliquary in its common ecclesiastical sense (a container for holy relics). In legal usage, reliquary is a term of account, not of religion, denoting a debtor of a balance due. The convergence of the two spellings in historical sources creates a genuine trap for researchers encountering the word in manuscript or early-printed legal documents without accounting context.
Why It Matters in Research
Reliqua is a term of civil law accounting that surfaces most often in pre-modern legal sources, particularly in texts influenced by Roman and Scottish law, and in ecclesiastical and manorial account rolls where Latin record-keeping persisted well into the early modern period. Researchers working in these materials should recognize the term as a signal that an account has been balanced and a remainder identified — it marks a computational moment in a record, not a free-standing obligation.
Several navigational cautions apply:
First, the reliqua is the product of a liquidation process, not a primary debt instrument. Finding the term in a source does not tell you the original obligation; it tells you what remained after partial satisfaction. Researchers tracing the full history of a debt must work backward through earlier account entries.
Second, the derived term reliquary (or reliquatary) appears inconsistently across historical dictionaries and primary sources. Some sources use it only for a debtor who pays piecemeal; others use it more broadly for any debtor of a balance. This inconsistency can affect how a passage is construed when the character of the debtor's payment obligations is at issue.
Third, Bouvier's entry places reliqua immediately before relocatio without a clear section break, a formatting artifact of the original print edition. Researchers consulting Bouvier's in scanned or uncorrected digital form should verify they are reading the correct entry and have not inadvertently run the two definitions together.
Fourth, the term has essentially no modern American common law application. It belongs to the civil law tradition and to historical legal Latin. When it appears in 19th-century American legal dictionaries, it is carried forward from civil law sources rather than reflecting active domestic usage. Researchers should treat American dictionary citations to reliqua as derivative of the same underlying civil law tradition, not as evidence of independent American doctrinal development.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries agree closely on the core definition: reliqua is the balance or remainder owed upon the settlement of an account. Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier's track one another almost verbatim, with all three tracing the definition to the Encyclopaedia Londinensis — suggesting a common secondary source rather than independent research into primary civil law texts.
Burrill diverges slightly in phrasing, defining reliqua as "the balance or arrears of an account" and citing Spelman, which points to Sir Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum as a source. This is a useful distinction: Burrill's reliance on Spelman rather than the Encyclopaedia Londinensis suggests the term had some currency in English medieval legal vocabulary as well as in the civil law tradition proper.
None of the historical sources give extended treatment to the procedural or doctrinal context in which a reliqua would arise — how an account was formally balanced, what remedies attached to the recovery of a reliqua, or how the concept interacted with related civil law actions. Researchers needing that depth must go beyond the dictionary shelf to civil law treatises, including Mackeldey's Civil Law (cited by Bouvier in the adjacent relocatio entry), or to Roman law sources directly.
Jurisdictional Note
Reliqua is a term of civil law origin with no recognized common law equivalent. It is most likely to appear in sources from civil law jurisdictions (including Scotland and Louisiana), in ecclesiastical court records, and in English manorial or exchequer accounts where Latin accounting terminology was used. It has no operative role in modern American or English common law.