Definition
In old English law, the boundary lines running along the sides of a parcel of land. Sidings defined the lateral extent of a landholding, distinguishing the side measurements from the front and rear limits. The term functioned as a component of the broader system of land description by which the precise physical extent of a property was established.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of siding — most commonly, a short section of railroad track beside a main line, or the exterior cladding material on a building.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A short railroad track connected to a main track; also, the boards or other material forming the outside covering of a frame building.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is complete: nothing in the modern or historical lay usage of "sidings" relates to land boundaries. A researcher encountering the term in an old English conveyancing document who imports the railway or construction meaning will fundamentally misread the text.
Common Confusion
Sidings is closely associated with BUTTALS (also spelled BUTTLES or BOUNDING), the complementary term for the front and rear boundary lines of a parcel. The two terms travel together in old English land descriptions: buttals addressed the head and foot of the land; sidings addressed the flanks. Researchers should be alert to this pairing — encountering one term without the other in a historical deed may indicate an incomplete or damaged record. Neither term should be confused with METES AND BOUNDS in the modern sense, which is a comprehensive surveying system using courses and distances that superseded these older relational boundary terms.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of historical English land law with no surviving operational use in modern American or English property practice. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-eighteenth-century conveyancing instruments — grants, feoffments, deeds of bargain and sale, and similar documents — where the physical description of the land relied on relational boundary language rather than surveyed distances and compass bearings.
The primary research trap is the railroad and construction meaning of "siding," which is overwhelmingly dominant in any general search of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources. Corpus searches that do not filter by document type and date will return vast quantities of irrelevant material. Searches in old English land records should pair this term with BUTTALS to locate the associated boundary description.
Because the term appears in the abbreviated and often cryptic language of old English legal records, the Burrill entry's citation to Cro. Jac. (Croke's reports of cases in the reign of James I) situates it in the early seventeenth century. Researchers working with English land records from roughly the Tudor through early Stuart period are most likely to encounter this usage.
No American equivalent exists. The metes-and-bounds and rectangular survey systems used in the United States never adopted this terminology, so the term is not a live issue in American jurisdictional research.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the foundational entry, characterizing sidings as boundary lines on the sides of lands and directing the reader to BUTTALS for the complementary concept. The entry is brief, which is consistent with the term's narrow scope — it is a descriptor within a larger system of land description, not a legal concept with doctrinal content of its own.
The historical dictionaries do not expand meaningfully beyond this. The term does not appear to have generated significant legal controversy or litigation, which is why it left so thin a trace in the reference literature. Its importance is practical rather than doctrinal: understanding the term is necessary to reading old conveyancing language accurately, not to resolving any legal question about property rights.
What the historical sources do not address is how sidings and buttals were measured or verified in practice, or what happened when competing descriptions placed side boundaries in different locations. For those questions, researchers would need to consult specialized works on the history of English land surveying and conveyancing practice rather than legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
Sidings as a term of land description is an English law concept and does not appear in American jurisdictional practice. Researchers working with colonial-era grants that derive from English Crown patents may occasionally encounter it, but the term had no purchase in the developing American land law systems.