Definition
Tenementis legatis (Latin: "of tenements bequeathed") is the name of an ancient English writ directed to the city of London or to any other municipal corporation that recognized a local custom permitting inhabitants to devise lands and tenements by will as freely as personal property. The writ invoked the jurisdiction of the corporation's court to hear and determine disputes arising from such testamentary dispositions of real property. It was, in effect, a procedural instrument that activated a localized exception to the general common law rule against the devise of freehold land.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the extinct writ system and will surface almost exclusively in pre-1838 English legal sources, registers of writs, and antiquarian treatises on London's civic customs. Researchers encountering it in historical documents should treat it as a marker of two overlapping legal phenomena: (1) the existence of borough custom permitting testamentary transfer of real property before the Statute of Wills (1540) regularized such transfers across England, and (2) the now-vanished jurisdictional competence of municipal corporations to adjudicate property succession disputes. Because the writ presupposes the very custom it enforces, finding it in a source tells you something about the locality — not just the procedure.
The writ is procedurally inert today. It was never transplanted to American law and has no counterpart in modern practice. A researcher encountering the term in a nineteenth-century American digest or treatise (as in the Rapalje & Lawrence cross-references to New York and Indiana cases under the broader heading TENEMENTS) should take care: those adjacent references concern what property qualifies as a "tenement" under various statutes, not the writ itself. The writ and the broader category of tenements are related only etymologically and historically.
The citation in all three source dictionaries to Reg. Orig. 244 refers to the Registrum Omnium Brevium, the standard register of original writs. Researchers wishing to trace the writ's procedural form should consult that source directly; it is available in early print editions and through digitized collections of early English legal texts.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence — are in precise agreement, reproducing virtually identical language and citing the same authority. This uniformity suggests the compilers drew from a common root, almost certainly Giles Jacob's Law Dictionary or an equivalent intermediary that itself drew on the Registrum. The agreement is notable but unsurprising: by the time these American dictionaries were compiled, tenementis legatis was already a purely historical artifact, and there was no evolving caselaw to track.
What the historical dictionaries do not explain is the substantive legal mechanism: why London and certain other boroughs had this custom at all. The answer lies in the peculiar status of burgage tenure — a form of urban freehold that in many boroughs was treated by local custom as descendible and devisable like personal property, predating any parliamentary authorization. The dictionaries record the writ's existence without explaining the tenurial foundation that made it necessary. Researchers needing that context should consult Blackstone's Commentaries, Book II, Chapter 6 (on the incidents of tenure) and Chapter 23 (on devises), where burgage tenure and customary devise rights are discussed in their proper doctrinal setting.
Rapalje & Lawrence adds a marginally useful cluster of cross-references under the heading TENEMENTS that points researchers toward questions about what property qualifies as a tenement in statutory and testamentary contexts — a related but distinct inquiry from the writ itself.
Jurisdictional Note
Tenementis legatis is exclusively English in origin and application. It was never adopted in American colonial or state practice. American references to "tenements" in statutory or testamentary contexts are governed by local property and probate law entirely independent of this writ.