Definition
Resceit of homage is the formal act by which a feudal lord received the homage of a tenant upon the tenant's admission to land held under him. It was the lord's side of the homage ceremony: when a new tenant was admitted to a feudal holding, the lord accepted — or "receited" — the oath of fealty and submission that constituted homage, thereby completing the feudal bond between them.
The term captures a specific procedural moment in the feudal land system. Homage itself was the solemn acknowledgment by a tenant of his obligation to the lord; the resceit was the lord's corresponding act of acceptance. Without the lord's reception, the homage was incomplete, and the feudal relationship not fully formed.
Why It Matters in Research
This is an archaic term of purely historical significance, encountered almost exclusively in early English legal materials dealing with feudal tenure. Researchers are most likely to meet it in treatises, yearbooks, and case reports from the medieval and early modern English common law period, or in secondary works describing those sources.
The term appears in both Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence with identical definitions, both citing Kitchin's treatise on courts leet and courts baron (Kitch. 148 / Kit. 148), which is an early authority on the practical administration of manorial courts. That citation offers a direct avenue into the procedural context of homage in manorial practice.
Researchers working in American property law will not encounter this term in any operative legal sense — feudal tenure was formally abolished or rendered inoperative across American jurisdictions from the colonial period onward, and the ceremonies of homage never took hold in American law. The term survives only in historical dictionaries, treatises on English legal history, and materials concerning the English common law background of property doctrine.
When researching the historical foundations of property law, land tenure, or the feudal incidents that shaped early common law, resceit of homage connects to a cluster of related concepts — fealty, seisin, livery of seisin, and the various feudal incidents such as relief and escheat — that shaped English real property law for centuries and left traces in American doctrine even where the ceremonies themselves did not survive.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement on this term, reproducing essentially identical definitions and the same underlying citation. Neither source elaborates beyond the core meaning, which is consistent with the narrow, technical, and historically bounded nature of the concept. Both dictionaries treat the term as a fixed expression requiring no further subdivision or qualification.
The brevity of both entries reflects the term's status by the time these dictionaries were compiled: resceit of homage was already a relic of feudal practice, preserved in legal dictionaries for reference purposes rather than active legal use. Neither source attempts to connect the term to contemporary doctrine, and no such connection exists.
The Kitchin citation shared by both sources points to a manorial practice text rather than case law or statute, underscoring that this was a procedural term of court and tenure administration rather than a creature of higher common law adjudication.
Jurisdictional Note
Resceit of homage is a term of English feudal law and has no operative meaning in any modern jurisdiction. In the United States, feudal tenure incidents were extinguished as a practical matter from the colonial period, and the concept has no equivalent in American property law.