Definition
The legal offense of withholding or withdrawing from another person something to which that person is entitled by law. The term encompasses a range of duties — feudal, ecclesiastical, domestic, and testamentary — where a party owed an obligation refuses or neglects to perform it. Principal forms include:
(1) Subtraction of suit and services: withdrawal of, or failure to perform, the fealty, suit of court, rent, or other services owed to a lord or lessor by a tenant. A recognized injury to real property in English common law.
(2) Subtraction of tithes: the refusal or neglect of a parishioner to pay tithes owed to an ecclesiastical authority. Triable in ecclesiastical courts.
(3) Subtraction of conjugal rights: the withdrawal by a spouse from cohabitation and the performance of marital duties, giving rise to an action in ecclesiastical courts for restitution of conjugal rights.
(4) Subtraction of legacies: the withholding by an executor or administrator of a legacy or distributive share to which a legatee or heir is legally entitled.
(5) Subtraction of church rates: refusal to pay rates levied for the maintenance of the parish church.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The arithmetic process of taking one number from another; the removal of something.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act or operation of taking away a part; the taking of a lesser number or quantity from a greater. Webster's also acknowledged a third sense — "the withdrawing or withholding from a person of some right to which he is entitled by law" — indicating the legal meaning was still current in 1913.
The legal meaning is essentially the arithmetic metaphor made concrete: something owed is subtracted from what the entitled party receives. The gap is significant. A modern researcher encountering "subtraction" in a legal source will almost certainly misread it as arithmetic or loose synonym for "removal" unless they recognize the term as a formal English legal category with its own doctrinal history.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
The five principal forms (suit and services, tithes, conjugal rights, legacies, church rates) are not mere illustrations — they were treated as distinct legal categories with distinct forums and remedies. Subtraction of services was a common law matter; subtraction of tithes and conjugal rights were ecclesiastical; subtraction of legacies could proceed in ecclesiastical or probate jurisdiction depending on the period and the nature of the estate.
Why It Matters in Research
Subtraction is a term that does not survive well into modern American law, yet it appears throughout historical English legal sources and will be encountered in materials from the colonial period through the mid-nineteenth century. Researchers working in any of the following areas should treat it as a term of art:
Feudal tenure and real property: Sources discussing suit of court, fealty, or services will use subtraction as the name for the actionable withdrawal of those obligations. It connects directly to the writ system — the writ of cessavit, for example, was available where a tenant had committed subtraction of services.
Ecclesiastical law: Subtraction of tithes generated a large body of ecclesiastical court jurisprudence in England. American researchers will encounter this primarily in colonial contexts, where established churches existed, or in discussions of church-state legal history.
Domestic relations: Subtraction of conjugal rights is the historical predicate for the action for restitution of conjugal rights, a remedy that persisted in English law into the twentieth century and that appears in American cases and treatises through at least the mid-nineteenth century. Researchers in family law history should not assume the phrase "conjugal rights" in historical sources refers only to modern no-fault divorce concepts.
Probate and estate law: Subtraction of legacies bridges ecclesiastical court jurisdiction and common law probate. In early American jurisdictions that inherited English probate practice, this terminology will appear in surrogate court records and equity proceedings.
The term largely disappears from American legal usage after the abolition of ecclesiastical courts, the conversion of feudal tenures, and the reform of divorce law. Its disappearance, however, is not uniform — some American treatises and digests from the nineteenth century preserve it as an organizing category, while others silently fold the underlying concepts into tort, contract, or domestic relations doctrine without using the word.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are largely in agreement on core meaning. Burrill provides the most complete treatment, grounding the term in Blackstone (2 Bl. Com. 88, 94, 98, 230) and Crabb's Real Property, and identifying the full range of subtypes. Black's (both editions) tracks Burrill closely and confirms the multi-forum character of the offense. Rapalje & Lawrence is more compressed but reinforces the connection to services and tithes. Anderson's provides a useful catalogue — feudal rents and services, tithes, conjugal rights, legacies, church rates — in compact form.
None of the American dictionaries fully engages the jurisdictional complexity (common law versus ecclesiastical) that would be essential to any practical understanding of the term in historical litigation. The dictionaries describe what subtraction was, not where it was pursued or what the remedies were. Researchers should not rely on dictionary definitions alone when trying to understand the procedural history of a subtraction claim; Blackstone and the ecclesiastical law treatises are the necessary supplement.
Bouvier's surviving excerpt in the source material is from a section on subterranean waters and does not address subtraction directly — a reminder that keyword searches in historical dictionaries can produce adjacency errors when sources are indexed by proximity rather than headword.
Jurisdictional Note
Subtraction as a formal legal category is primarily English. In American jurisdictions, the absence of established ecclesiastical courts eliminated the forum for subtraction of tithes, conjugal rights, and church rates almost entirely, though the underlying conduct was sometimes actionable under other theories. Subtraction of services retained some relevance in early American property law where feudal tenure concepts persisted, but was largely absorbed into contract and landlord-tenant doctrine by the early nineteenth century.