Definition
An archaic English legal term for the bailiff of a franchise or manor. In parishes situated within royal forests, the reve also served as the officer responsible for marking or identifying commonable cattle — that is, livestock entitled to graze on common land. The term is a variant spelling of REEVE and carries identical meaning.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of "reeve."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To reave" — an obsolete verb meaning to plunder or rob, used by Chaucer.
The Webster's 1913 entry conflates this spelling with an entirely unrelated archaic verb. A researcher encountering "reve" in a historical legal document should not associate it with "to reave" (to plunder); the legal term is a spelling variant of "reeve," denoting a manorial or parish officer, not an act of taking by force.
Common Confusion
REVE and REEVE are the same office; "reve" is simply a variant spelling found in older manuscripts and legal texts. Researchers should not treat them as distinct terms. The broader family of reeve-derived titles — portreeve, shire-reeve (sheriff), hayward — describe related but distinct officers and should not be conflated with the manorial reve described here.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal records: manorial rolls, forest eyre proceedings, common-law treatises, and ecclesiastical or parish records tied to royal forest administration. Its practical significance is twofold.
First, spelling instability. Medieval and early modern scribes rendered this office variously as reve, reeve, reve, and reave. Corpus searches keyed only to one spelling will miss instances of the others. Researchers working in Law Mind's historical sources should run parallel searches across all variant forms before concluding a term is absent from a document.
Second, the forest-parish function. Most general legal dictionaries treat the reve primarily as a manorial bailiff and mention the commonable-cattle role only in passing. In practice, the cattle-marking function was jurisdictionally specific: it arose within parishes that fell inside the boundaries of a royal forest, where common rights to pasture were regulated by forest law rather than ordinary manorial custom. Documents touching this function will intersect forest law, common of pasture, and agistment — a cluster of terms that require separate research threads.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law redirects the reader to REEVE without independent discussion, which is editorially correct but means a researcher who encounters only the "reve" spelling may not immediately recognize the cross-reference. Follow that redirect.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both first and second editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement, drawing on Cowell's Interpreter for the definition. All three sources define the term identically: bailiff of a franchise or manor, plus the forest-parish cattle-marking role. Anderson's offers no independent definition, treating "reve" as a simple variant spelling.
No meaningful divergence exists among the historical dictionaries on this term. What they collectively omit is context: none explains how the reve's authority related to the broader hierarchy of manorial officers (steward, bailiff, hayward), nor do they clarify the relationship between the reve's cattle-marking duties and the forest law system of agistment and pannage. Researchers needing that context must move beyond the dictionary shelf to manorial and forest law treatises.
Jurisdictional Note
This is a term of English origin with no American legal application. It belongs to the feudal and manorial legal order of England and has no operative equivalent in United States law. It may appear in American legal dictionaries solely as a historical reference.