Definition
In feudal property law, the concept of a right or title "remounting" describes the upward reversion of a legal interest through a chain of title — the movement of a right back to a superior holder after it has descended or passed downward. The term captures the bidirectional movement of property rights in feudal tenure: just as an interest could descend (fall downward through inheritance or succession), it could also remount (rise back) to a prior or superior claimant under certain conditions.
The term is drawn from Law French and reflects the logic of feudal estates, where rights in land were not permanently fixed at any single level of the tenurial hierarchy but could travel both up and down depending on failure of heirs, forfeiture, or other triggering events.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not established as a standard English entry. In general usage, "remount" means to mount again — to get back onto a horse or to reattach something.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To mount again; to reascend.
The ordinary meaning of "remount" captures the physical sense of going up again, which maps loosely onto the legal concept. However, the legal use is specifically technical: it describes the doctrinal movement of a property right or title interest upward through a tenurial chain, not a simple physical act. The legal concept carries feudal structural significance that the common meaning entirely lacks.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in older English property law materials — primarily medieval and early modern sources dealing with feudal tenure, seisin, and the descent of estates. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should treat it as a marker for feudal property doctrine rather than as a term with any modern operative legal meaning.
The key research trap is chronological: remounter and its conceptual framework became largely obsolete with the collapse of feudal tenure in England (accelerated by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660) and has no meaningful analog in modern American property law. Encountering the term in a historical source signals that the surrounding text is likely engaged with feudal hierarchy, escheat, reversion, or the law of descent as understood in the medieval and early modern common law tradition.
The Britton passage preserved in Burrill — "this right descends sometimes, like a thing falling, and sometimes goes up again" — reflects a broader jurisprudential preoccupation in early common law with the directionality of title. Researchers tracing the history of reversion, escheat, or the hierarchy of tenure will find this concept relevant as intellectual background, even where the word itself does not appear.
Cross-corpus connections: researchers who encounter remounter should also consult sources on seisin, reversion, and the feudal incidents of tenure. The concept overlaps with but is distinct from escheat (which involves a right reverting to the lord upon failure of heirs or attainder) — remounter is the broader descriptive term for upward title movement, not limited to those specific triggering events.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary English-language legal dictionary source for this term, and its treatment is brief but precise. Burrill provides the Law French root and quotes directly from Britton (a thirteenth-century English legal treatise), which is the natural home for this kind of feudal vocabulary.
The Britton quotation is genuinely instructive because it frames remounter not as an anomaly but as a normal feature of feudal right: property interests were understood to be in natural motion, capable of both descent and ascent. This bidirectionality is the conceptual core. No modern American legal dictionary is likely to carry this term, and researchers should not expect to find it in post-nineteenth-century sources except in historical or comparative legal scholarship.
Burrill's treatment does not elaborate on the specific legal conditions that trigger a remounting of title — this is a limitation of the source. For fuller treatment, researchers would need to consult Britton directly or Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, which engages extensively with the movement of seisin and right through the feudal hierarchy.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is grounded in English feudal law and has no operative presence in any modern American or Commonwealth jurisdiction. It is relevant only in historical legal research contexts.