Definition
An Old French legal term meaning inquest or inquisition — a formal inquiry conducted under legal authority. The term appears in early Norman legal texts and reflects the administrative vocabulary carried into England following the Conquest. Burrill notes that Howard renders it alternatively as "the hundred," suggesting the term could also refer to the administrative district in which such an inquiry was conducted, or perhaps to the jury or body of persons assembled to conduct it.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal history, Domesday-era records, or Norman law will encounter this term almost exclusively in its Latin and Old French documentary context. Two research traps are worth flagging:
First, the dual meaning identified by Burrill — inquest versus hundred — is not a minor ambiguity. In Norman administrative practice, the hundred was the territorial unit within which an inquest was typically conducted, and the assembled body of the hundred often constituted the inquest itself. Sources may use "baschel" or variant spellings to mean the process, the territory, or the body of persons, and context must determine which sense is operative.
Second, the spelling is unstable across historical sources. Variant forms appear in medieval Latin and Anglo-Norman records, and researchers should not rely on a single spelling when searching manuscript indexes or early printed collections of Norman law. The citation anchor in Burrill — "LL. Gul. Conq. 1. 4." — refers to the Laws of William the Conqueror, a document that itself exists in multiple recensions with varying textual authority, so cross-referencing to a reliable critical edition is advisable before drawing conclusions about meaning from that source alone.
Third, the connection between this term and the hundred reinforces the broader point that early English administrative law operated through layered Norman and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. A researcher tracing inquest procedure from Domesday forward will need to hold both Norman French terms like "baschel" and their Latin equivalents alongside the Anglo-Saxon terminology they displaced or coexisted with.
This term is unlikely to appear in post-medieval legal sources and has no living doctrinal significance. Its value is purely historical and archival.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary source for this entry and provides a concise but informative treatment. He gives the French origin, the meaning of inquest or inquisition, the textual authority (Laws of William the Conqueror), and the alternative rendering by Howard. No other major historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — not Bouvier, Black, or Tomlin — appear to carry this term, which reflects its narrow historical scope. The absence from those dictionaries is itself a research data point: the term was sufficiently obscure by the nineteenth century that only a dictionary of Burrill's antiquarian reach preserved it. Researchers should treat Howard's "hundred" rendering as a scholarly interpretation rather than a settled equivalence, and should consult the primary Norman legal texts directly where the distinction matters.