Definition
An obsolete English legal term, derived from the Law French, meaning admeasurement — the formal measurement or assessment of something to determine a proper allotment, limit, or share. In medieval English law, amesurement referred to the official process of measuring or apportioning rights, lands, or penalties to ensure that no party exceeded their lawful entitlement. It appears most prominently in two related contexts:
1. Admeasurement of dower: The process by which a widow's dower right in land was formally measured and assigned, particularly where her portion had been set too broadly or encroached on the shares of heirs or co-parceners.
2. Admeasurement of pasture: The process of limiting the number of animals a tenant could put on common land to the number their own land could support during winter — a check against surcharging the common.
The term is a variant spelling of, and functionally equivalent to, ADMEASUREMENT. It is encountered almost exclusively in old English legal sources and carries no independent modern legal meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records will encounter AMESUREMENT as an orthographic variant of ADMEASUREMENT. The two terms are interchangeable; do not treat the spelling difference as a substantive distinction. Because Law French orthography was unstable across manuscripts and printed registers, the same writ or procedure may appear under either spelling — or under additional variants — within the same collection.
The term's primary research value is as a pointer: when you see AMESUREMENT in an older text, it signals that the substantive doctrine you should be researching is ADMEASUREMENT, and from there, the specific context (dower, pasture, or forest rights) will direct you to the relevant body of feudal or common law procedure.
Burrill's entry cross-references Britton (c. 58) and the Registrum Originale (Reg. Orig. 155), both foundational sources for the writs of admeasurement. If you are tracing the procedural history of these writs, those are the correct primary sources to consult. The Registrum Originale, which compiled the standard forms of original writs, treated admeasurement of pasture as a recognized and sufficiently common action to merit its own writ form — indicating the doctrine had practical, not merely theoretical, significance in medieval land practice.
Jurisdictional carryover into American law is minimal. Some early American jurisdictions retained writs of admeasurement of dower in their common law inheritance, but the term AMESUREMENT itself does not appear with any frequency in American legal sources. Researchers encountering it in an American context are most likely looking at a direct quotation or citation from an English authority.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary identifies AMESUREMENT as a Law French term meaning admeasurement, citing Britton and the Registrum Originale, and does not elaborate further — treating it essentially as a cross-reference entry rather than a substantive definition. This is appropriate given the term's status as a spelling variant rather than an independent legal concept.
No divergence among historical dictionaries is meaningful to flag here because the entry is sparse by design. What Burrill does not say, but what a researcher should understand, is that the substantive law — the writs, the procedures, the rules about dower and common of pasture — lived under ADMEASUREMENT in the treatise literature, not under this variant spelling. Britton and Bracton address the underlying doctrines in substance; AMESUREMENT is simply how the term arrived in certain manuscript and printed sources.
Jurisdictional Note
AMESUREMENT is a term of English medieval law with no operative meaning in modern common law jurisdictions. Where admeasurement doctrines survived into the nineteenth century — particularly admeasurement of dower — they did so under the spelling ADMEASUREMENT. Researchers in Scottish, Irish, or colonial legal records should verify locally whether the variant spelling appears in those traditions.