Definition
Of or relating to a tenement; capable of being held by tenure or lease; held by tenants. The term describes property that is susceptible to being granted, leased, or held as a tenement — that is, property capable of forming the subject matter of a tenurial relationship. In older property law usage, "tenementary" characterized lands or hereditaments that could be the object of a formal holding between landlord and tenant or lord and vassal.
The term appears most naturally as an adjective modifying property interests — tenementary lands, tenementary rights — to distinguish property capable of tenurial holding from property that is not susceptible to such grants.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Capable of being leased; held by tenants.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Capable of being leased; held by tenants.
In this instance, common and legal usage converge in their basic formulation, but the legal context adds weight the common definitions do not carry. In property law, "tenementary" invokes the technical framework of tenure — the feudal and post-feudal structure governing how land is held — rather than simply describing a modern landlord-tenant lease. A researcher encountering this term in historical legal sources should read it against the law of tenements and tenure, not merely modern rental arrangements.
Why It Matters in Research
This is an uncommon adjective encountered primarily in older English and American property law materials — treatises, conveyancing texts, and early case law dealing with real property tenure. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in sources predating the twentieth century, where the vocabulary of feudal tenure retained practical legal significance.
The principal research trap is reading "tenementary" through a modern lens as a synonym for "pertaining to tenement housing" — the urban multi-unit dwelling sense of tenement that dominated popular usage by the late nineteenth century. In historical legal sources, the term has nothing to do with housing conditions or tenement reform; it belongs entirely to the vocabulary of property tenure and conveyancing.
Because the term modifies property interests susceptible to tenurial holding, corpus researchers should connect it to entries and sources dealing with tenements (in the property law sense), hereditaments, and freehold or leasehold estates. When encountered in early American sources, it often signals the author is working from English common law property frameworks, including Blackstone and the older conveyancing tradition.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry retrieved in association with this term concerns tender, which is unrelated — a reminder that historical dictionary compilations sometimes group or paginate entries in ways that can mislead keyword searches. Researchers should verify the surrounding textual context when relying on snippet-level retrieval from historical legal dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary are in full agreement: "capable of being leased; held by tenants," with Webster's attributing the usage to Spelman — Henry Spelman, the seventeenth-century English antiquarian and legal historian whose Glossarium Archaeologicum was a foundational reference for archaic property and tenure terminology. That attribution is significant: it places "tenementary" squarely within the antiquarian-legal tradition of English land law scholarship, suggesting the term was already reaching toward archaism even by the early modern period.
No substantive entry from Rapalje & Lawrence was retrievable for this term. The absence of a dedicated entry in a major nineteenth-century American law dictionary is itself informative — by that period, "tenementary" had receded from active American legal practice vocabulary, surviving mainly in scholarly or historical property law writing rather than in pleading or transactional usage.
Historical sources collectively treat the term as descriptive rather than operative: it characterizes property but does not itself create or define a legal right. Researchers should not expect to find it functioning as a term of art in the way that "fee simple" or "hereditament" does.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs to English common law property vocabulary and carries that lineage into early American legal writing. It is unlikely to appear in civil law or Louisiana property sources, and its practical use in any American jurisdiction had largely faded by the late nineteenth century. Modern statutory or regulatory sources will not use it.