Definition
A historical term denoting the inhabitants of the counties of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire in England. The word appears in early English legal and administrative records as a collective designation for the population of that southwestern region. It has no operative modern legal meaning and functions today solely as a term of historical and antiquarian interest.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering BELGE in historical English legal materials — particularly pre-modern records touching on taxation, military levies, local governance, or customary obligations — should treat it as a regional designation rather than a term of legal art with substantive doctrinal content. Its appearance in a source will typically signal a geographically bounded obligation, right, or record applicable to the population of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire collectively.
The term is a potential trap for researchers unfamiliar with early English regional nomenclature. Without context, it could be mistaken for a personal name, a foreign-language insertion, or an entirely different legal concept. The absence of the term from most modern legal dictionaries and its survival in only a handful of historical compilations means that Burrill's Law Dictionary is likely to be one of the few reference points available within a standard legal research library.
Researchers working with Domesday Book records, Anglo-Saxon and early Norman administrative documents, or antiquarian treatments of English regional law should be alert to variant spellings. Historical orthography was inconsistent, and related or cognate regional designations may appear in different forms across manuscript and printed sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry for this term among standard historical legal dictionaries, defining it simply as "Inhabitants of Somerset, Wilts and Hantshire." The entry is a bare identification — no elaboration on etymology, legal function, or the sources from which Burrill derived the designation. This brevity is characteristic of how Burrill handled terms that were essentially obsolete curiosities even at the time of his compilation. No corresponding entry appears in Bouvier, Black, or other standard historical dictionaries of American or English law, which suggests the term carried little or no transatlantic legal significance and was not received into American legal usage.
The regional grouping itself — Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire — corresponds roughly to the territory associated with the ancient Belgae, a pre-Roman and Romano-British people whose settlements clustered in that part of southern England. This antiquarian connection likely explains the term's preservation in records and, by extension, in Burrill's compilation, though Burrill himself does not make this connection explicit in the entry.