Definition
An archaic legal term denoting the right or liberty to use a river for fishing and fowling. To "riveare" was to exercise those specific riparian privileges — hunting waterfowl and taking fish — along or upon a watercourse. The term describes a use-right attached to river access rather than ownership of the riverbed or water itself.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources and in treatises drawing on that tradition. It does not appear as an operative term in modern common law jurisdictions; any modern dispute touching the underlying rights will be framed instead in the language of riparian rights, profit à prendre, or public trust doctrine.
The practical research trap is mistaking riveare for a property right in the river itself. Historically, the liberty to fish and fowl was a separable privilege — it could be granted, claimed by prescription, or enjoyed by custom independently of ownership of the riverbed. A grantor could convey riparian land while reserving the riveare, or vice versa. Researchers examining early land grants, manorial records, or conveyances involving watercourses should be alert to this severability: the presence or absence of fishing and fowling rights in a chain of title may not track ownership of the bed at all.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry, though brief, appends important context: rivers above the flow and reflow of the tide are prima facie private, but many have become subject to public rights of navigation by immemorial use or statute. Crucially, the right of navigation confers no right of property or of fishing. This clarifies the layered structure of river rights that makes riveare meaningful — navigation, fishing, fowling, and bed ownership were each conceptually distinct entitlements, and riveare captures only two of them.
For corpus researchers, connections run to riparian rights more broadly, to the profit à prendre (a right to take something from another's land), and to the historical treatment of tidal versus non-tidal waters as a dividing line for public and private rights. The tidal/non-tidal distinction referenced in Rapalje & Lawrence remains operative in modern riparian law even where the term riveare has entirely disappeared.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence — offer the identical core definition, attributing it uniformly to Cowell (John Cowell's Interpreter, 1607), which is the original source for this term in the common law lexical tradition. The verbatim agreement across dictionaries signals that none of the compilers independently verified the term against case law; they are each transmitting Cowell's gloss.
Rapalje & Lawrence is alone in appending substantive riparian doctrine beyond the bare definition. That appended material, while not strictly part of the definition of riveare itself, reflects the 19th-century understanding of the doctrinal framework within which such ancient river liberties would have been assessed. This makes Rapalje & Lawrence the more useful starting point for researchers trying to connect the historical term to its legal context.
What the historical sources do not supply: any record of riveare appearing in reported cases, any statutory treatment, or any discussion of how such a liberty would have been formally created, transferred, or extinguished. Cowell's entry appears to be the terminus of the common law dictionary tradition on this point.
Jurisdictional Note
Riveare as a term is confined to English legal history and the civil-law and manorial traditions from which it derives. No American jurisdiction employs the term as operative law. Equivalent rights in the United States are addressed through riparian rights doctrine, profit à prendre analysis, or, for navigable waters, public trust doctrine — all of which vary by state.