Definition
THR is an abbreviation appearing in historical legal manuscripts and printed legal texts, most commonly as a shorthand for "things real" (sometimes rendered *res real* or *realty*). In legal usage, the abbreviation signals a reference to the category of property that is permanent, fixed, and immoveable — as distinguished from things personal (chattels), which are moveable and transitory.
"Things real" as a substantive category encompasses land, tenements, and hereditaments: property interests that, by their nature, are attached to a place and pass according to rules of real property law rather than personal property law. The abbreviation THR appears in the dense marginal notations, running heads, and index clusters of early English legal dictionaries and treatises, where spatial economy on the page made contractions essential.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering THR in a historical legal source should treat it as an indexing or annotation marker, not a freestanding term of art. Burrill's Law Dictionary, for instance, groups entries under compressed headings where THR may appear as a section abbreviation preceding or following substantive entries on "Things Real," "Things Accessary," and related maxims. The surrounding text — such as the maxims that "things incident cannot be severed" and "things accessary are of the nature of the principal" — belongs to the classical real property taxonomy drawn from Blackstone and Coke, adapted into American usage through the 19th century.
The principal research trap here is misreading THR as a term with independent legal meaning when it functions purely as a typographic or organizational shorthand. In digitized versions of historical dictionaries, OCR errors and imperfect page segmentation can cause abbreviations like THR to appear as isolated entries, separated from the substantive content they index. If you encounter THR as a standalone result in a corpus search, retrieve the surrounding pages before drawing any conclusion about meaning.
Corpus connections: Entries on THINGS REAL in historical dictionaries invariably cross into discussions of hereditaments, tenements, corporeal and incorporeal interests, and the feudal incidents that attached to land (such as the perquisites of earls referenced in the Laws of Edward the Confessor, cited in Burrill). Researchers tracing real property concepts across the Law Mind corpus should follow those threads rather than the abbreviation itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not treat THR as a defined term. The fragment in which it appears is a compressed sequence of entries and maxims organized under the heading "Things Real" and related subheadings. Burrill draws on Blackstone's Commentaries, Coke's Institutes, and early English statutes (including the Laws of Edward the Confessor) to sketch the classical division of property into real and personal categories. The maxims quoted — that things incident cannot be severed from the principal, that accessories follow the nature of the principal — are statements of general property law that appear across multiple historical sources and are not unique to any single authority.
Historical legal dictionaries as a class are consistent in treating "things real" as a formal category, but they vary in how they handle the boundary cases: fixtures, growing crops, and certain incorporeal hereditaments appear differently across Burrill, Bouvier, and Jacob's Law Dictionary depending on the period of each work's composition and the jurisdiction it primarily addresses. None of these sources uses THR as a defined term; the abbreviation is an artifact of layout and notation.
Jurisdictional Note
The category of "things real" as a formal legal division is primarily an English common law inheritance. American jurisdictions adopted the real/personal property distinction but have largely replaced classical terminology with statutory definitions. Researchers working in American sources after the mid-19th century will find the substance of "things real" addressed under statutory headings for real property, real estate, or land, rather than under Latinate or historical abbreviations.