Definition
A Latin form of uncertain origin appearing in older English legal records, used to designate a specific place: Bowness or Bulness, in Cumberland (now Cumbria), England. The term functions as a Latinized toponym — a place name rendered into Latin for use in formal legal instruments, pleadings, writs, and official records during periods when Latin was the standard language of English legal documentation. It carries no independent legal meaning beyond identifying this geographic location.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational hazard for researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records, land documents, or ecclesiastical records touching on the northern counties of England. Latinized place names were standard practice in formal instruments from roughly the Norman period through 1733, when an Act of Parliament abolished Latin as the required language for English legal proceedings. A researcher encountering BLATUM BULGIUM in a writ, charter, inquisition, or boundary description who does not recognize it as a toponym may misread the document entirely, treating a place reference as a legal term of art.
The Cumberland region carries particular significance for several classes of historical legal records: border administration between England and Scotland, marches law, ecclesiastical holdings, and Crown land grants. Documents involving Bowness-on-Solway or the adjacent Solway Firth area may surface this Latinization. Researchers should be alert to variant spellings — Latin transcription of place names was not always consistent across scribes, courts, or centuries, and alternate forms may appear in different record sets without cross-reference.
Because the term appears only in Burrill and not in the major competing historical dictionaries (Jacob, Bouvier, Black), its absence from those sources is itself informative: it reflects the narrow, records-based character of Burrill's compilation, which captures terminology that more doctrinally oriented dictionaries overlooked. Researchers relying solely on Black's or Bouvier's would find no entry and might be left without a clear identification.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source among the major historical legal dictionaries to record this term, and its entry is brief to the point of minimalism: the definition is simply an identification of the place as Bowness or Bulness in Cumberland. Burrill does not provide historical context, cite a source document, or explain the derivation of the Latinized form — a limitation typical of his treatment of obscure topographical entries, which functioned more as a glossary of encountered terms than as a critically annotated reference. No entry appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Black's Law Dictionary in any edition. The term's absence from those works reflects their lesser engagement with the documentary Latin of English local and ecclesiastical records.
Jurisdictional Note
Relevant exclusively to English legal history, particularly records originating in or affecting Cumberland and the northern border counties. No application in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions.