Definition
In old English law, the right or use of a river for purposes such as fishing and similar riparian activities. The term denotes a recognized entitlement to exploit a river's natural resources, encompassing the practical exercise of fishing rights and analogous uses of a watercourse.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): fishing.
Historical common usage: No entry in Webster's 1913; the term appears to have had no substantial life outside legal and quasi-legal writing.
Editorial note: The common core — fishing in a river — is familiar enough, but riviation carries legal weight the ordinary word lacks. It denotes a formal right attached to riparian property or royal grant, not merely the activity of catching fish. A researcher encountering "riviation" in an old English document is reading a term of legal entitlement, not a description of recreational conduct.
Common Confusion
Riviation is sometimes loosely treated as a synonym for piscary (the right of fishing in another's water) or for riparian rights generally. The distinction matters. Piscary is a specific profit à prendre, a defined incorporeal hereditament, exercisable over another's water. Riparian rights attach by virtue of land ownership along a watercourse. Riviation appears in the older sources as a broader category of river use — including but not necessarily limited to fishing — suggesting it encompassed the general enjoyment of a river rather than one precisely defined right within the common law framework of profits and easements.
Why It Matters in Research
Riviation is rare enough that most researchers will encounter it only in pre-modern English legal documents, treatises on the law of the sea and tidal waters, or records touching royal grants of fishing rights. Several practical cautions apply.
First, the term does not survive into modern legal usage in any jurisdiction. Its presence in a document is a reliable signal that the source predates the consolidation of English property law into its current categories, likely placing it in the medieval or early modern period.
Second, the primary authority Burrill cites — Hale's De Jure Maris — deals with the prerogative rights of the Crown over tidal waters, the foreshore, and navigable rivers. Encountering riviation in that context means the researcher is in territory where the Crown's superior title and the public's customary fishing rights intersect, a distinct and contested area of English law. Do not read rights described as riviation as equivalent to the private riparian rights that dominate modern water law.
Third, because the term sits at the boundary of royal prerogative, local custom, and private property, it is poorly served by later legal dictionaries that developed their vocabulary after these categories had hardened. A researcher who finds a gap between Burrill's brief treatment and what the primary source seems to demand should go directly to Hale and to the older Year Books and plea rolls rather than expecting later dictionary authority to fill the space.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the principal — and effectively sole — authority among the standard legal dictionaries for this term. His entry is brief: the right or use of a river for fishing and similar purposes, citing Hale's De Jure Maris, Part 1, Chapter 2. No independent elaboration is offered.
The brevity is itself informative. Riviation never acquired the doctrinal density of piscary or riparian right; it remained a descriptive word in a narrow set of texts rather than a term of art around which litigation and commentary accumulated. Black's Law Dictionary does not carry the term in its major editions, confirming that it did not transition into the American legal vocabulary. Bouvier likewise omits it.
What Burrill does not provide — and what the historical dictionaries as a class cannot supply — is any account of how riviation related to the Crown's prerogative over navigable waters, the rights of common fishers in tidal rivers, or the competing claims of manorial lords to river fisheries. Those questions require direct engagement with Hale and with the primary medieval sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Riviation is a term of old English law with no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or modern English jurisprudence. Researchers working in American water law or modern riparian doctrine will not encounter it as a live term; its relevance is confined to historical English legal materials.