Definition
In legal usage, to savour of something means to partake of its nature, to bear affinity to it, or to be characterized by it. The term appears most commonly in older common law contexts where a right, interest, or tenure was said to "savour of the realty" or "savour of the freehold," meaning it was of a real property character — attached to or associated with land — as distinguished from personal property. The phrase functioned as a classificatory tool, allowing courts and writers to assign an ambiguous legal interest to one side or the other of the real/personal property divide.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To enjoy something deeply or in a lingering manner; to taste, relish, or appreciate. Also, to detect a flavour or aroma.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To have a particular smell or taste; to partake of the quality or nature of something; to indicate the presence or influence of something.
The common meaning and the legal meaning are not unrelated, but the legal sense is narrower and more technical. Where ordinary usage is sensory and appreciative — lingering over a meal — the legal usage is classificatory and analytical. When a legal writer says a right "savours of the realty," no enjoyment is implied; the statement means only that the right bears the legal character of real property. Researchers unfamiliar with the term may misread it as merely descriptive or metaphorical when it is in fact performing doctrinal work.
Common Confusion
The phrase "savour of the realty" is sometimes read as loose or rhetorical when it is in fact a term of art with substantive consequences. Whether an interest savoured of the realty affected how it passed at death, whether it could be seized on execution, and how it was treated in equity. The term should not be dismissed as ornamental language in older instruments or judicial opinions.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century real property law, tenure, or equity will encounter this term in primary sources without definition. Its significance lies in the real/personal property classification it signals. An interest that savoures of the realty — such as certain rents, advowsons, or heritable offices — followed the rules of real property transmission: it descended to heirs rather than passing to executors, and it was subject to different rules of alienation and forfeiture.
The term fades from legal writing as the old distinctions between real and personal actions collapsed and as property law was modernized by statute. By the late nineteenth century it appears mainly in commentary on historical doctrine. Researchers reading equity treatises, early American property cases, or English common law materials from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries are most likely to encounter it.
The second edition of Black's adds a reference to "one of the old privileged places," citing 4 Stephen's Commentaries. This usage — savour in the sense of a sanctuary or privileged location — is entirely distinct from the property-classification sense and reflects a now-archaic ecclesiastical and sanctuary law context. Researchers should be alert to this second, unrelated usage when the word appears in discussions of church courts, sanctuary, or ecclesiastical privilege.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's define the term identically as "to partake the nature of; to bear affinity to." The second edition adds the sanctuary-law reference without elaboration. Neither edition develops the doctrinal significance of the phrase in property law or explains when the classification mattered. The entries are accurate as far as they go but provide minimal guidance.
The property-law usage is better treated in older English legal dictionaries and in treatises on real property and tenure. The sanctuary-law usage, noted only in the second edition, is a historical curiosity traceable to the medieval law of privileged places and has no modern application.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs substantially to English common law and to early American jurisdictions that received it. It has no significant modern statutory presence in any jurisdiction and is unlikely to appear outside historical legal materials.