Definition
In old English land records, sidelings (also rendered in Latin as sidlingi or sythlingi) refers to unploughed strips or pieces of land running along the sides of arable fields. Functionally equivalent to meres or balks — the narrow, unworked margins left between cultivated plots — sidelings served as boundary markers and passage ways within the open-field system of medieval and early modern English agriculture. They were not independent parcels capable of separate conveyance but were understood as incidental features of field layout, defining the edges and divisions of the surrounding arable land.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of sideling — an archaic or dialectal word meaning something set or moving sideways, at a slant, or obliquely.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; sideling appears as an adjective or adverb meaning inclining to one side, sloping, or moving sideways.
The gap between the common and legal meaning is structural, not merely semantic. The common word describes orientation or posture — something tilted or slanted. The legal term describes a category of land feature: the unploughed lateral margins of open arable fields. The shared root in "side" is suggestive but does not carry meaning across contexts. A researcher encountering sidelings in a medieval survey or conveyance record should not interpret it as a description of sloping terrain.
Why It Matters in Research
Sidelings appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English manorial records, surveys, extents, field books, and ecclesiastical terriers. Researchers working in those sources need to recognize it as a term of art within the open-field system, not a generic topographical descriptor.
The key navigational point: sidelings, butts, balks, and headlands are a cluster of related terms describing the unworked structural margins of open arable fields. They tend to appear together in surveys. Burrill cross-references butts explicitly, and that cross-reference is functionally important — a researcher who does not follow it will miss the comparative context that clarifies how these features related to one another spatially and legally.
Because sidelings denote boundary features rather than independently held land, they rarely appear as the subject of conveyances. When they do surface in deeds or terriers, it is typically as locational references — "abutting upon the sidelings of the west field" — rather than as the property being transferred. Misreading them as parcels can distort a researcher's reconstruction of a historical landholding.
The term drops out of active legal usage with the enclosure movement, which eliminated the open-field system and its associated vocabulary. Post-enclosure land records will not use it. Its presence in a document is therefore itself a dating signal, pointing toward pre-enclosure or transitional-period sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary English-language legal dictionary source for this term. His definition is concise and technically accurate: unploughed pieces of land on the sides of fields, equated with meres or balks. He cites Monasticon Anglicanum (2 Mon. Angl. 275) and Cowell's legal dictionary as authorities, situating the term firmly within the documentary tradition of English manorial and ecclesiastical land surveys.
Cowell's Interpreter is the upstream source Burrill draws on, and researchers wanting fuller historical context should consult it directly. Neither source elaborates on the legal consequences attached to sidelings — their function as boundary markers is treated as self-evident within the open-field system, which any reader of such records was assumed to understand. Modern researchers no longer share that assumption, making Burrill's brief entry less complete than it appears.
No equivalent entry appears in Black's Law Dictionary or Bouvier's Law Dictionary, reflecting the term's confinement to the specialized literature of English manorial history rather than common law doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
Sidelings is a term of English manorial and agricultural law with no meaningful equivalent in American legal usage. It will not appear in American land records. Researchers working in English ecclesiastical or manorial archives are the primary audience for this entry.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: Land Tenure and Field Systems
See also: Manorial Records and Surveys