Definition of "messuage" [mes•suage]

• A plot of land as the site for a house; later, a residential building taken together with its outbuildings and assigned land. (noun)

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• "Glendinning is supposed to have inhabited, the head of the Allen, about five miles above its junction with the Tweed, shows three ruins of Border houses, belonging to different proprietors, and each, from the desire of mutual support so natural to troublesome times, situated at the extremity of the property of which it is the principal messuage."
• "Huge triangular piles of planks are also reared in different parts of the devoted messuage; and a little group of trees, that still grace the eastern end, which rises in a gentle ascent, have just received warning to quit, expressed by a daub of white paint, and are to give place to a curious grove of chimneys."
• "The family continued to inhabit this new messuage until about fifty years before the commencement of our history, when it was much damaged by"