Definition
Wanlass is an obsolete term of English feudal land tenure. It describes a customary service obligation by which a tenant was bound to drive deer toward a fixed position so that the lord could take a shot. The tenure was not a grant of land in the ordinary sense but rather a servitude attached to the holding of land — the tenant's right to occupy derived from or was conditioned upon the performance of this specific hunting service for the lord.
Like other customary tenures tied to personal or agricultural services (such as cornage, ploughbote, or escuage), wanlass reflects the medieval English system in which land rights and personal obligations were inseparable. The service itself — driving game to a stand — was a defined, repeatable act, not a general labor duty.
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Why It Matters in Research
Wanlass is encountered almost exclusively in historical sources dealing with English feudal tenures. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it as a live legal term in any modern jurisdiction, but it may appear in:
- Medieval English land records, manorial surveys, and inquisitions post mortem where customary tenures are described
- Historical treatises on English land law, particularly those addressing the varieties of tenure that survived or were abolished by statute
- Antiquarian legal works such as Blount's Tenures (1679), which is the primary cited authority for this term across all source dictionaries
- Comparative law or legal history scholarship on the development of property rights and the commutation of feudal services
The term belongs to the cluster of hunting-service tenures — a category sometimes overlooked in general treatments of feudal land law, which tend to focus on military tenures (knight service, castle guard) or agricultural ones (villeinage, socage). Researchers working in manorial history or the history of game law may find wanlass relevant to understanding the relationship between lords, tenants, and rights over game in the pre-modern period.
Note that the first entry under Black's Law Dictionary in the source material ("N as a symbol of the deforcement, and protest for remedy of law") is a separate definition that appears to be misassociated with this headword — likely an artifact of typesetting or indexing in the source volume. It describes a Scottish notarial symbol and has no connection to wanlass. Researchers using digitized or OCR-processed versions of historical law dictionaries should be alert to this kind of adjacency error.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in agreement: wanlass denotes an ancient customary tenure of land in which the service rendered was driving deer to a stand for the lord's shot. All three trace the term to a single authority — Blount's Tenures (specifically cited as "Blount, Ten. 140"), indicating that Thomas Blount's 1679 compilation remains the foundational source for this term in the Anglo-American legal dictionary tradition.
Rapalje & Lawrence adds cross-references to Stephen's Commentaries and Broom & Hadley's Commentaries, suggesting the term had some continued relevance in legal education contexts during the nineteenth century, even if only as an example of extinct tenure forms.
None of the source dictionaries offer case law, statutory authority, or discussion of how the tenure operated in practice beyond the brief definitional statement. This is consistent with wanlass being a term of purely historical interest by the time these dictionaries were compiled. The absence of reported litigation is unsurprising: customary hunting tenures of this kind were largely extinguished or commuted well before the modern era of law reporting.
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Jurisdictional Note
Wanlass is specific to English feudal land law. It has no recognized equivalent in American property law and no continuing operational existence in any common law jurisdiction. Its relevance today is confined to legal history and historical property research.
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