Definition
In canon law, the condition that exists when the revenue of a benefice is sufficient to fully satisfy or occupy the entire right or title of the graduate who holds it. A benefice in repletion generates income adequate to fill the incumbent's claim completely — no shortfall, no surplus claim remaining unmet. The term is a technical descriptor of the financial relationship between a church living and the canonical rights attached to it.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The condition of being replete; fullness. Also, plethora of the blood.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The state of being replete; superabundant fullness. Applied to physical satiety, excess of nourishment, or fullness of blood (plethora).
The common meaning carries a sense of excess or overfullness — more than enough. The canon law meaning is narrower and more precise: not surplus, but sufficiency. A benefice in repletion meets the graduate's entitlement exactly or adequately; the term describes adequacy of revenue, not abundance beyond need. A researcher encountering "repletion" in a non-ecclesiastical legal context should treat it with caution, as it almost certainly carries the ordinary meaning rather than the canonical one.
Why It Matters in Research
Repletion is a narrow term of ecclesiastical and canon law with almost no footprint in secular common law or modern legal doctrine. Researchers will encounter it primarily in pre-twentieth-century sources dealing with English church law, benefices, livings, and the rights of university graduates to ecclesiastical preferment.
The chief navigational trap is placement in the historical dictionaries. All three source dictionaries define repletion immediately before entries on repleviable and replevisable — terms with completely unrelated meanings in property and civil procedure. Researchers scanning column-by-column in older digest formats may inadvertently conflate these entries or assume a doctrinal connection where none exists. The proximity is alphabetical accident only.
Repletion has no meaningful modern American legal usage. If it appears in a contemporary document, it almost certainly carries the ordinary English meaning of fullness or satiety, not the canon law meaning. In historical English ecclesiastical sources, however, the term connects directly to the law of advowsons, first fruits, and the rights of Oxford and Cambridge graduates to presentation to livings — a specialized corpus requiring knowledge of both church governance and the historical relationship between English universities and the established church.
Researchers working in probate or trust documents from ecclesiastical estates, or in historical records of church courts, should be alert to the term but should not expect to find it frequently even there. Wharton's Law Lexicon, cited by Black's as the source authority, is the most appropriate secondary source for further elaboration in the ecclesiastical law context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement on the definition, and all three trace the term to Wharton. The uniformity is itself informative: none of the historical dictionaries elaborate beyond a single sentence, which reflects the term's narrowness rather than any ambiguity. No jurisdiction-specific variation is noted in any source, and no case law is cited in support — consistent with a term that functions as a descriptive status category rather than a litigated doctrine.
What the historical sources do not address: any procedural consequence of repletion, any mechanism for determining when repletion is or is not achieved, or any connection to related canon law concepts such as sequestration or dilapidations. Researchers needing functional depth beyond the definitional statement will need to go beyond these dictionaries to ecclesiastical law treatises.
Jurisdictional Note
Repletion in its canon law sense is a concept rooted in the law of the Church of England and the ecclesiastical systems of continental Europe. It has no recognized application in American law, where there is no established church and no system of benefices in the canonical sense.