Definition
Latin: "Articles concerning money" or "Articles concerning the currency." Articuli de Moneta is the title of an English statute enacted in the twentieth year of the reign of Edward I (1292). The statute addressed the regulation of coinage and monetary matters in medieval England, establishing rules governing the currency at a time when control of the money supply and coin quality were central concerns of the Crown. It is a historical legal term encountered almost exclusively in research into medieval English law and early statutory history.
Common Confusion
Articuli de Moneta should not be confused with Articuli Magnae Cartae (Articles of Magna Carta), which appears immediately after it in Burrill's Law Dictionary. The two share only their Latin grammatical form and their classification as medieval English legal instruments. Articuli Magnae Cartae concerns the foundational constitutional agreement of 1215 under King John; Articuli de Moneta concerns monetary regulation under Edward I some seven decades later. The adjacency in alphabetical listings has occasionally caused them to be conflated in secondary references.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter Articuli de Moneta primarily when tracing the history of English monetary regulation or surveying the statutory output of Edward I's reign, which was among the most legislatively prolific in medieval English legal history. Edward I's era produced foundational statutes across land law, commercial law, and public finance, and Articuli de Moneta belongs to that cluster.
The key navigational challenge is that this statute does not appear in many general indexes or modern compilations of English statutes — it sits in the older chronicle-style legal histories rather than in standard statute rolls as commonly reprinted. Researchers should go directly to Reeves' History of English Law and Crabb's History of English Law, both of which are cited in the historical dictionaries and remain the principal secondary sources locating and describing this enactment. Neither Black's nor Burrill's provides substantive content beyond the title and the regnal year; the actual provisions of the statute must be reconstructed from those historians.
Be alert to the difference between this statute and broader Edwardian monetary legislation. Edward I's reign saw multiple interventions in coinage and currency, and confusion between related enactments is easy. The regnal year — twentieth year of Edward I — is the reliable anchor when searching primary or chronicle sources.
For corpus researchers working in Law Mind materials, Articuli de Moneta will appear as a citation rather than as a substantively discussed doctrine. Its significance is bibliographic and historical rather than doctrinal: it signals that the surrounding text is engaged with medieval English monetary or fiscal law, often in the context of explaining the origins of Crown authority over currency.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this entry, to the point of near-identical language. Both define the term as "articles concerning money, or the currency," identify it as a statute of the twentieth year of Edward I, and cite the same two secondary sources: 2 Reeves' History of English Law at page 228 and Crabb's History of English Law at page 167 (American edition). Burrill adds the citation in slightly more complete form ("2 Reeves' Hist. Eng. Law, 228") and uses the fuller author-title style.
Neither dictionary provides any substantive description of what the statute actually contained — both treat the term as a bibliographic signpost rather than a legal concept requiring doctrinal analysis. This is consistent with the function of such entries in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries, which routinely catalogued the titles of historical English statutes for identification purposes without summarizing their provisions. Researchers should treat these entries as a starting point for locating the statute, not as a guide to its content.
Burrill's entry is immediately followed by a separate entry for Articuli Magnae Cartae (Articles of Magna Carta), which concerns a different and far more significant document — the forty-nine articles agreed at Runnymede underlying King John's charter. The proximity of these entries in alphabetical sequence can cause a researcher scanning Burrill's to conflate them; they are entirely distinct instruments separated by nearly a century of English legal history.