Definition
An archaic Law French adjective meaning reasonable. In medieval legal texts, *renable* operates as the equivalent of the modern English "reasonable," qualifying nouns such as portion, share, or estovers. It appears most commonly in two fixed phrases:
1. *De renable partie* — "of reasonable part," referring to a widow's or heir's entitlement to a reasonable portion of an estate or property.
2. *Renables estovers* — "reasonable estovers," meaning the reasonable allowance of wood or other materials that a tenant was entitled to take from land for fuel, fencing, or repair. The qualifier *renable* served the same function as "reasonable" does in modern estovers doctrine: limiting the tenant's right to what is proportionate and not wasteful.
The term is purely historical and appears in no modern legal usage.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Reasonable; also loquacious or talkative.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Reasonable; also loquacious. "Most renable of tongue." — Piers Plowman. Marked as obsolete.
The common English meaning of *renable* as "loquacious" or "talkative" has no legal counterpart whatsoever. When researchers encounter the word in legal sources, only the sense of "reasonable" applies. The talkative sense appears in literary Middle English (Chaucer, Langland) but never migrated into law. Conflating these senses when reading a medieval legal record would produce nonsense.
Common Confusion
Researchers may initially misread *renable* as a variant spelling of *renewable* or *renable* in the sense of capable of being renewed. These are false cognates. The word has no connection to renewal, repetition, or continuation. It derives from the same root as "reasonable" and carries that meaning exclusively in legal contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
*Renable* is a pure glossary term — a Law French fossil that surfaces in Year Books, early English plea rolls, and medieval treatises but has no life in modern legal writing. Its research significance is almost entirely navigational:
**Reading Year Books and early common law sources.** The Year Book citation in Burrill (*M. 8 Edw. III. 2*) places the term firmly in the early fourteenth century. Researchers working in Year Book materials will encounter *renable* and its variants without glosses. Recognizing it as the functional equivalent of "reasonable" is necessary for accurate interpretation of tenant rights, dower claims, and estovers entitlements in that period.
**Estovers doctrine.** *Renables estovers* is the medieval formulation of a doctrine that survived into equity and eventually into modern property law as the reasonable-use limitation on a life tenant's or lessee's right to take wood. The word *renable* drops out of the doctrine as English displaces Law French, but the substantive rule it qualified persists. Researchers tracing the history of estovers limitations will find *renable* at the doctrinal origin point.
**Dower and partition.** *De renable partie* connects to the widow's reasonable part, a concept running through dower law and partition. When Britton (c. 73) uses this phrase, the reasonableness standard it encodes is doing real legal work. Understanding the term prevents misreading the phrase as a proper name or technical term of art with no equivalent in modern doctrine.
**Corpus search behavior.** A keyword search for "reasonable" in a database of medieval texts will not retrieve *renable*. Researchers must know both forms to run complete searches across different time periods.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary legal dictionary source to treat *renable* with any specificity. His entry is brief and accurate: he translates it as "reasonable," supplies the two standard phrases (*de renable partie* and *renables estovers*), and provides the Britton and Year Book references. He does not elaborate on the doctrinal significance of either phrase, leaving the researcher to connect the term to broader bodies of law on their own.
Webster's 1913 confirms the translation and adds the "loquacious" sense with literary citations, correctly flagging both as obsolete. That entry is useful for general historical reading but adds nothing to the legal meaning.
No major modern legal dictionary (Black's, Bouvier's) retains a substantive entry for *renable*; it has passed entirely into the domain of historical glossaries. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as the best available one-stop reference for the legal term and supplement it with specialized glossaries of Law French such as those appended to editions of Britton or the Year Books.
Jurisdictional Note
*Renable* is exclusively a term of English law, embedded in the Norman French legal vocabulary of medieval England. It has no equivalent usage in Scottish, Irish, or civil law traditions and no trace in American legal materials.