Definition
In old English pleading, *strues* is a Latin term denoting a rick or stack, most commonly of hay. The term appears in early pleading records as a precise descriptor for a quantity of harvested and stacked agricultural produce — distinguishing a formed rick from loose or unbound material. Its use was technical rather than substantive: the word carried legal weight in pleadings where the identity or description of the chattel at issue needed to be stated with particularity.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *strues* in old English pleading records, year books, or early modern reports should treat it as a descriptor of a specific agricultural chattel — a stacked rick — rather than as a legal concept carrying doctrinal content. Its appearance signals a dispute involving damage to or conversion of stored agricultural goods, often in the context of trespass or trover actions where precise identification of the subject matter was required by the pleading rules of the time.
The term is nearly absent from post-seventeenth-century legal sources, which reflects both the decline of Latin pleading and the consolidation of agricultural terminology in English. A researcher working through early modern English reports — particularly those predating the shift to English-language pleading formalized in the nineteenth century — may encounter *strues* without any glossarial assistance in the source itself. Burrill's single citation to 1 Mod. 289 (a volume of the Modern Reports covering late seventeenth-century English cases) confirms the term's period of active use and anchors it to a traceable source.
Be cautious about assuming *strues* encompasses all stacked goods. Its historical usage appears tied specifically to hay or similar harvested material. Applying it loosely to any agricultural stack risks anachronism in transcription or translation work.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary — and in the Law Mind corpus, the sole — legal dictionary source for this term. His entry is terse: a Latin term, a pleading context, a single citation. Nothing in his treatment suggests substantive doctrinal significance; the entry functions purely as a vocabulary gloss for a reader encountering the word in a primary source.
The citation to 1 Mod. 289 is the natural next stop for any researcher seeking context. The Modern Reports were a series of English case reporters covering roughly 1669–1732, and volume 1 falls in the latter seventeenth century — a period when Latin pleading vocabulary was still standard but beginning its long decline.
No broader synthesis is possible across the Law Mind shelf on this term; no other historical dictionary in the corpus covers it. The absence of entries in later dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's, or similar American compilations) is itself informative: *strues* did not migrate into American legal practice in any meaningful way, and its relevance is confined to English legal history and the interpretation of pre-modern English pleading documents.