Definition
The act of spreading cut grass outward from the swath in which it was mown, allowing it to dry. In legal contexts, tedding arises as a term of agricultural custom and practice, most often in disputes over the scope of rights to harvest hay — including rights of common, rights of estovers, or obligations attached to agricultural tenancies. Whether a party with the right to cut grass also had the right to ted it (and thus occupy the land for the additional time drying requires) was a question of practical significance in common-field and manorial land disputes.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Present participle and gerund of "ted" — to spread or turn newly mown grass for drying.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To ted is to spread for drying. "To ted newly mown grass."
The common and legal meanings here are essentially continuous — tedding in law means exactly what it means in agricultural practice. The legal significance arises not from any departure in meaning but from context: courts were called upon to determine whether tedding was included within or ancillary to a stated right to mow, making precision about what the act physically entails relevant to the legal analysis.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in two contexts: (1) early English common law reports dealing with rights over land — particularly rights of common in pasture or meadow, hay-bote, and similar customary entitlements — and (2) agricultural lease and tenancy disputes where the extent of a tenant's permitted use of the land is at issue.
The uniform source across all four dictionaries is "10 East, 5," referring to a volume of East's Reports, an English King's Bench series covering the early nineteenth century. This citation grounds the legal usage of the term in a specific English case and should be the first stop for any researcher seeking doctrinal elaboration. All four dictionaries reproduce the same single-sentence definition with no expansion, meaning the historical legal record offers minimal analytical gloss — the term was apparently considered self-explanatory to practitioners of the era.
A key research trap: because tedding is a term of agricultural practice rather than a term of art invented by law, it will appear in source documents — leases, customs of the manor, estate records — written in the vocabulary of farming rather than legal pleading. Researchers searching for the term in digitized historical records should cast broadly across estate management documents, ecclesiastical records governing tithes on hay, and manorial court rolls, not only formal law reports.
Bouvier and both editions of Black's are in complete agreement. Burrill adds a secondary entry unrelated to grass-spreading — "tedding" as a synonym for a charter or deed of land (Latin: charta seu libellus praedialis), citing Spelman and Reeves' History of English Law. This second meaning appears to be etymologically distinct and archaic even by Burrill's time. Researchers using Burrill should take care not to conflate the two entries; the Spelman-derived meaning relates to documentary title evidence, not agricultural process, and belongs to a different chain of legal history entirely.
Jurisdictional relevance is essentially confined to English common law and its early American reception. The term will rarely appear in modern American legal materials except in historical land title research or scholarly treatment of common-field agriculture.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
All four dictionaries — Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's — converge on a single definition: tedding is spreading grass after it has been cut in the swath. The unanimity reflects both the simplicity of the concept and a clear shared source in 10 East, 5. None of the dictionaries elaborates on the legal significance of the distinction between cutting and tedding, leaving the reader to infer from context why the term warranted inclusion in a law dictionary at all.
Burrill's entry is the outlier of interest. After giving the standard agricultural definition, Burrill records a second, apparently unrelated sense: "tedding" as an archaic term for a deed or charter of land, citing Spelman's Glossary and Reeves' History of English Law. Burrill renders the Latin equivalents (charta seu libellus praedialis; scriptum quo praediorum jus continetur et tuetur) and notes that telligraphia — evidences or muniments of title — carried the same sense. This second meaning is absent from Black's and Bouvier's entirely, suggesting it was either too archaic for general legal reference by their period or considered outside the practical scope of those works. Researchers in medieval land law or Anglo-Saxon property history may find Burrill's secondary entry more relevant than the agricultural definition.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The legal significance of tedding is rooted in English common law, particularly in manorial and common-field land use disputes. American courts would have applied the concept only where English agricultural customs survived in early colonial land grants or where tenancy agreements tracked English precedent closely. It is not a term of active legal significance in modern American jurisdictions.
---