Definition
A historical English legal remedy available to the inhabitants of Berkshire permitting them to levy money recovered against them under the law of hue and cry. When a county's inhabitants were held collectively liable for a robbery or similar offense under hue and cry statutes — on the theory that the community failed to pursue and apprehend the offender — Benhurst provided the procedural mechanism by which those inhabitants could in turn levy or apportion that financial burden among themselves.
The term is narrowly local and purely historical. It does not describe a cause of action, a crime, or a general equitable remedy; it describes only the internal collection mechanism available to one English county after collective liability had already been established against it.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will almost certainly find it only in older English legal sources, county histories, or treatises on the law of hue and cry. Several points are worth noting:
First, Benhurst is Berkshire-specific. It is not a general term applicable to other English counties, and no parallel term appears to have been adopted nationwide. If a researcher is working with records from other counties on analogous hue-and-cry levies, different terminology will apply and Benhurst will not appear.
Second, the statute underlying the hue and cry liability framework — referenced in Bouvier's as 39 Eliz., c. 25 (the 39th year of Elizabeth I's reign, chapter 25) — is the operative document for understanding what liability attached before Benhurst became relevant. Researchers should consult that statute directly for the scope of collective county liability; Benhurst only addresses the downstream levy mechanism.
Third, this term illustrates a pattern common in pre-modern English law: locally customary remedies developed to administer statutory liability that Parliament imposed collectively but left communities to sort out internally. Researchers working on the history of collective liability, communal punishment, or local taxation should flag Benhurst as an example of this pattern, even if the term itself is unlikely to recur.
Finally, because the term is highly obscure and geographically limited, the risk of false positives in corpus searches is low — but the risk of simply not finding it is high. Searches for hue and cry materials, Berkshire legal history, or Elizabethan poor-law and criminal-administration records are the most productive routes to adjacent material.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry, and its treatment is brief: "A remedy for the inhabitants of Berkshire to levy money recovered against them on the statute of hue and cry," citing Cunningham's Law Dictionary and 39 Eliz., c. 25.
Bouvier does not elaborate on the procedural mechanics of the levy, the officers responsible for its administration, or how disputes about apportionment were resolved. Cunningham's Law Dictionary, cited by Bouvier, represents an earlier English source; researchers who need more than Bouvier provides should consult Cunningham directly, as it likely contains additional period detail.
No entry for Benhurst appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Blount's Nomo-Lexikon, or Cowell's Interpreter, at least not under this spelling. The absence from those sources reinforces that this was a term of narrow local currency rather than general English legal usage. Historical sources do not disagree with one another here — they simply say very little.
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Jurisdictional Note
Benhurst is an English common law term of purely local application to Berkshire under Elizabethan statute. It has no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions, and it did not survive into modern English law in any operative form.
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