BARILLATUM

Definition

A medieval Latin term appearing in old English legal and administrative records, denoting a vessel or container used to hold liquids — most commonly wine. The term functions as a unit of measurement as well as a descriptor of the physical container itself. In the context from which it is drawn, barillatum refers to a daily allocation of wine of a specified minimum volume (at least one gallon) to be delivered from the king's cellarer to a knight in royal service. The term is closely related to BARILLUS (also BARILLUM), which appears in parallel sources with the same essential meaning: a barrel or cask. Barillatum may represent an inflected or variant form of barillus, adapted to fit the grammatical construction of the Latin text in which it appears.

Common Confusion

Barillatum and barillus are used interchangeably in some sources and should not be treated as legally distinct terms. Neither term carried a standardized legal definition tied to a fixed volume — the passage from Fleta itself specifies a minimum quantity (one gallon) precisely because the vessel's actual capacity was variable. Researchers should not assume barillatum corresponds to any modern unit of barrel measurement.

Why It Matters in Research

This term surfaces almost exclusively in medieval English administrative and household records — particularly those governing provisioning obligations owed to knights, officials, and servants of the royal household. Researchers working with Fleta or similar compilations of thirteenth-century English law will encounter it as part of the technical vocabulary of purveyance and household management rather than as a substantive legal concept with doctrinal weight. Several practical research cautions apply: First, barillatum is a hapax-adjacent term — it appears rarely and in narrow contexts. Its significance is archival rather than doctrinal. Finding it in a document places the record firmly within the genre of royal household ordinances or feudal service arrangements, not within pleading, conveyancing, or common law procedure. Second, the relationship between barillatum and any standardized unit of measure is unstable. The gallon reference in Fleta is a floor, not a definition. Medieval barrel equivalents varied by region, commodity, and era. Researchers should not rely on this term alone to reconstruct volume or quantity in a dispute. Third, the term does not appear in the major common law dictionaries beyond Burrill, and is absent from Cowell's Interpreter, Jacob's Law Dictionary, and Blount's Nomo-Lexikon. Its effective research footprint is confined to Burrill and the Latin source texts he references. If you encounter it in a manuscript context without those anchors, cross-reference against glossaries of medieval Latin administrative terminology rather than standard legal dictionaries.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary English-language lexicographic treatment of this term, drawing directly on Fleta (lib. 2, c. 5, § 6) as its source. Burrill renders barillatum tentatively as "barrel (?)" — the question mark is his own, signaling uncertainty about whether the term maps cleanly onto the English "barrel" or whether it simply denotes a liquid vessel of indeterminate size. This editorial caution is appropriate and should be preserved in any derivative research. Burrill also cross-references BARILLUS and BARILLUM as companion forms. The cartulary reference appended to the barillus entry (Cartular. H) is truncated in the available source text and cannot be fully evaluated. Researchers should treat that citation with caution unless the full cartulary can be identified and consulted independently. No meaningful divergence among historical sources exists here, because no other major historical legal dictionary appears to have treated this term independently. Burrill is effectively the sole lexicographic authority in the English tradition, and his treatment is derivative of the Latin primary source.

Jurisdictional Note

This term is specific to medieval English law and administration. It has no meaningful counterpart in Scots, Irish, or continental legal traditions for purposes of English-language legal research.

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