Definition
Riens in arrere (also rendered "riens in arrear") is a plea in bar historically available to a plaintiff in an action of replevin, by which the plaintiff asserts that no rent was in fact due and unpaid at the time the defendant took the distress. The substance of the plea is a denial: nothing was in arrear. If the plaintiff could establish this, the distress was wrongful from its inception, and the goods had to be returned.
Common Language
This term is Law French and carries no meaningful presence in ordinary modern English. Wiktionary and Webster's 1913 do not address it. The component words offer some orientation — "riens" is Law French for "nothing," and "in arrere" corresponds to the modern English "in arrear" or "in arrears," meaning overdue and unpaid — but the phrase as a unit is purely a term of pleading art with no common-usage counterpart.
Why It Matters in Research
Structural pattern: historical evolution with narrow procedural scope.
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in older English and American common-law materials on replevin and distress. Several navigational points matter:
First, the plea belongs to a system of common-law pleading that has been substantially or entirely displaced in most jurisdictions. Under reformed English practice (post-Judicature Acts), the formal plea of riens in arrere gave way to a general denial or affirmative reply performing the same function, though Rapalje and Lawrence note that the new response was sometimes still called by the old name — a source of confusion in transitional-era materials.
Second, the plea's procedural posture is counterintuitive to researchers accustomed to modern civil procedure. In replevin, the plaintiff is the party whose goods were taken; the defendant is the distrainor. When the plaintiff pleads riens in arrere, the plaintiff is not admitting a tenancy or a debt but rather conceding the landlord-tenant relationship while disputing that any sum had fallen due before the distress issued. The plea thus operates as a confession-and-avoidance in reverse: it grants the legal framework of the distress but denies the factual predicate.
Third, researchers working in American sources should note that the action of replevin and the doctrine of distress for rent were received unevenly across states. Some states abolished distress for rent by statute at an early date, making riens in arrere practically moot in those jurisdictions even in the nineteenth century. The plea will appear more frequently in New York, Pennsylvania, and Southern state materials, where landlord-tenant law followed English common-law forms longer.
Fourth, the Woodfall treatise citation in Rapalje and Lawrence (Woodf. Land. & T. 476) points to Woodfall's Landlord and Tenant, a standard English authority through multiple editions. Researchers should verify which edition is being cited, as pagination varies significantly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje and Lawrence provide the core entry and correctly identify the plea's two functions: (1) as the original plea in bar by the plaintiff in replevin, denying arrears existed at the time of distress; and (2) as a label carried forward into reformed pleading practice, even after the formal plea structure it described had been superseded.
The entry is characteristically spare. It does not address what proof was required to sustain the plea, how it interacted with a plea of avowry or cognizance by the defendant, or what happened procedurally when the plea was traversed. Researchers needing that level of detail must look to the pleading treatises — Gould on Pleading, Chitty's Pleading, or Woodfall — rather than to the dictionary entry itself.
No meaningful divergence exists among the major historical dictionaries on this term because the term is narrow enough that most either track the same source or omit the entry entirely. The substantive law behind the plea — the requirement that rent be actually due before a distress could lawfully issue — is settled and consistent across English and American authorities of the period.
Jurisdictional Note
The plea is a product of English common law and was received in American jurisdictions that preserved the action of replevin and the landlord's right of distress. Many American states limited or abolished distress for rent by the mid-nineteenth century, making this plea and its associated procedural vocabulary largely obsolete outside specialized historical research into those jurisdictions.