Definition
An obsolete Latin law term drawn from old English legal practice, meaning admeasurement — the formal legal process by which a court measured and apportioned shares, allotments, or entitlements, typically in the context of dower, pasture rights, or partition. The term is a variant spelling and form of admensuratio, and the two are functionally interchangeable in historical sources. In practice, admeasurement proceedings were used to correct an excess or encroachment — for example, where a widow in dower occupation held more land than her rightful share, or where one commoner was overgrazing shared pasture beyond their allotted portion.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational signpost, not a substantive legal concept to be researched on its own terms. Researchers encountering amensuratio in a historical source should immediately redirect to admensuratio and admeasurement, where the substantive doctrine is developed and where relevant writs, procedures, and case law are collected.
The chief research trap is treating amensuratio as a distinct or parallel concept when it is simply an orthographic and scribal variant. Medieval Latin legal texts were inconsistently transcribed, and spellings like amensuratio, admensuratio, and the anglicized admeasurement appear interchangeably across manuscript sources, early print abridgments, and Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae — the primary authority cited in Burrill's entry. Researchers working with Bracton or Bracton-derived sources should search across all three forms.
The writ of admeasurement had two principal historical applications that appear in the corpus: admeasurement of dower (de admensuratione dotis) and admeasurement of pasture (de admensuratione pasturae). Records indexed under amensuratio may relate to either. Do not assume pastoral or agrarian context from the spelling alone — check the surrounding document.
Because this term survives almost exclusively in Latin-language legal texts and early common law treatises, it will appear in the Law Mind corpus primarily in historical source materials, glossaries of Latin legal terms, and commentary on Bracton. It is unlikely to appear in modern case law or statutory materials under this spelling.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary entry for amensuratio and is brief: it identifies the term as old English law Latin derived from amensurare, defines it as admeasurement, cites Bracton folio 314a, and directs the reader to admensuratio. This cross-referential treatment is itself informative — Burrill treats amensuratio as a variant form worth recording for lookup purposes but locates the substance under admensuratio.
No independent doctrinal content is offered under this spelling in Burrill, and no other shelf-source historical dictionaries develop the term further. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a confirmed redirect, not a primary source on the doctrine.