Definition
A residuary clause used in wills to capture any property not otherwise specifically devised or bequeathed in the instrument. The phrase functions as a catch-all, sweeping into a designated gift any estate, interest, or asset that the testator owned at death but failed to address by name or description elsewhere in the will. It is the operative language of a residuary disposition, ensuring that no property passes intestate by oversight or by the lapse of a prior specific gift.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical wills, probate records, or will-construction cases should treat it as a term of art with a settled legal function, not as casual or imprecise drafting. The phrase signals the residuary clause of the instrument, and its presence (or absence) is legally consequential: without it, property not specifically mentioned passed under intestacy rather than by will.
The primary research trap is misreading the phrase as vague or preliminary rather than as the technical opening of a residuary bequest. In historical probate practice, residuary clauses were frequently introduced with exactly this kind of expansive catch-all language, and courts interpreted such language broadly to avoid partial intestacy. A researcher analyzing will disputes should look for cases turning on whether a particular asset fell within or outside the scope of such a clause.
The Salk. 239 citation in Rapalje & Lawrence points to Salkeld's Reports, a significant early English common law reporter. Cases in that volume reflect the formative period of English residuary clause doctrine, when courts were still working out the relationship between specific devises, general bequests, and the residue. Researchers working on the development of American testamentary law should note that early American courts drew heavily on English practice in this area, and the doctrine interpreting such clauses crossed the Atlantic largely intact.
This phrase may also appear in connection with doctrine about lapsed legacies: when a specific gift failed (because the beneficiary predeceased the testator, for example), courts had to determine whether the lapsed gift fell back into the residue and passed under a clause of this type, or whether it passed by intestacy. The answer often turned on the exact wording of the residuary clause.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence identify this phrase with a single authoritative citation: 1 Salk. 239. The entry is spare, as was common for the dictionary's treatment of drafting formulas that were well understood by practicing lawyers of the era. The citation to Salkeld's Reports grounds the phrase firmly in English common law authority and signals that it was a recognized legal formula with established judicial interpretation, not merely one testator's idiosyncratic language.
The brevity of the Rapalje & Lawrence entry reflects the phrase's status as a known quantity in the legal literature of its time. Modern sources do not reproduce this phrase as a fixed term of art because contemporary will drafting uses more standardized residuary clause language (e.g., "all the rest, residue, and remainder of my estate"), but the underlying legal function is identical. Historical dictionaries provide no meaningful divergence on this point: the phrase was understood uniformly as residuary in character.
What historical sources do not address, and what researchers should supply from other materials, is the detailed body of case law developing when such a clause successfully captured lapsed, void, or after-acquired property, and when it did not.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase originates in English common law and was carried into American testamentary practice through colonial and early republican reception of English law. Modern American jurisdictions have largely replaced this archaic formulation with standardized residuary clause language, but the interpretive rules developed under phrases of this type remain foundational to residuary doctrine across common law jurisdictions.