Definition
A Law French term denoting the retreat, recession, or ebbing of water — specifically, the drawing back of a tide or body of water from the shore. Used in early common law property and water-rights contexts to describe the receding movement of water as the counterpart to the flow or flux of the tide.
The term appears in paired usage: *de un flot, et d'un retret* ("of a flux and a retreat"), which described the full cycle of tidal movement — the incoming flood and the outgoing ebb. This pairing was legally significant in determining the boundaries of tidal lands and the rights attached to them, since the ordinary high- and low-water marks were fixed by reference to this oscillation.
Common Confusion
RETRET should not be confused with the English legal concept of "retreat" as used in self-defense doctrine (the duty to retreat before using force). The two terms share a root idea of withdrawal but occupy entirely separate legal domains. RETRET is a property and water-law term of art from the Norman French layer of early common law; its only operative field is tidal boundary and riparian contexts. A researcher encountering "retreat" in a criminal law or tort source is reading an unrelated concept entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
RETRET is a term of extremely narrow historical usage. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in post-medieval English legal sources, but it surfaces in early Year Book materials, Norman French legal formulae, and treatises on tidal rights and foreshore ownership. Its primary research value is definitional: when parsing an archaic property document or early common law source that addresses tidal boundaries, the phrase *flot et retret* signals a tidal-cycle formula used to establish the seaward limit of foreshore grants or royal prerogative claims over tidal land.
The tidal boundary question this term underpins — where the ordinary ebb leaves off and the foreshore begins — remained a live issue in English property law well into the nineteenth century and was litigated in admiralty and chancery contexts. Researchers working on foreshore rights, Crown grants of tidal land, or the historical extent of the *jus publicum* in coastal property should recognize *retret* as a technical marker pointing toward that cluster of doctrine.
The term does not appear in later English legal dictionaries in its Law French form; by the time of Blackstone and the institutional writers, the concept is absorbed into plain English discussions of high- and low-water marks. Historical sources thus drop the term without dropping the underlying rule, which can create a gap for researchers tracing doctrinal continuity.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole dictionary source on record for this term. Burrill identifies it as Law French, derives it from *retrere*, and defines it as the retreat or ebbing of water, preserving the phrase *de un flot, et d'un retret* as the operative legal formula. The entry is brief, consistent with Burrill's treatment of archaic Norman French technical vocabulary, where he records usage without extended doctrinal elaboration.
No equivalent entry appears in later standard legal dictionaries, including Black's or Bouvier's, which is consistent with the term's obsolescence in post-Norman common law usage. Burrill's preservation of the Law French phrasing is therefore the primary reference anchor for any researcher encountering the term in primary sources.
Jurisdictional Note
RETRET as a term of art is specific to English common law and its Norman French inheritance. It has no operative meaning in American, Scottish, or civil law jurisdictions as a discrete legal term, though the underlying tidal-boundary doctrine it describes was transplanted into American property law through the common law reception and persists in coastal states' foreshore and public trust jurisprudence.