Definition
A medieval military engine used to batter down walls. The term appears in historical legal records and glossaries as a category of siege implement, functionally analogous to a battering ram or early catapult-type device employed to breach fortifications. Its legal significance arises primarily in the context of property destruction, the law of war, and feudal obligations related to military service and equipment.
Why It Matters in Research
This is an archaic term of art encountered almost exclusively in medieval legal instruments, feudal charters, military tenure records, and glossaries of obsolete law. A researcher meeting "bricolis" in a primary source should treat it as evidence of the document's antiquity and military-legal context rather than as a term with living legal significance.
The term surfaces most often in materials touching on the feudal obligation to supply or maintain military equipment, the legal status of destructive implements in siege warfare, and early ordinances governing the conduct of armed conflict. In English legal history, the possession or deployment of siege engines sometimes had implications for the rights of lords and kings — including questions of whether a siege engine constituted a royal prerogative instrument, which could affect property rights and liability for damage.
Because all three source dictionaries trace the definition to a single authority — Blount's Glossographia (or Blount's Law Dictionary) — researchers should be aware that the word's presence in Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence is derivative of that one source, not independently verified across separate legal traditions. If further context is needed, the original Blount text is the primary reference point, not these secondary compilations.
No modern legal meaning exists. The term will not appear in contemporary statutes, regulations, or case law. If encountered in a modern document, it is almost certainly a direct quotation from or reference to a historical source.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence — provide identical, single-sentence definitions: "An engine by which walls were beaten down," each citing Blount without elaboration. This unanimity reflects the term's complete dependence on Thomas Blount's seventeenth-century lexicographical work as the original authority.
The absence of any variation across the sources is itself informative: no independent legal development of the term occurred in English or American law after Blount recorded it. The dictionaries preserved it as a historical curiosity and glossary entry rather than as a term with active doctrinal content. Researchers should note that even at the time these dictionaries were compiled, "bricolis" was already an antiquarian entry — included for completeness in covering medieval legal vocabulary, not because courts or practitioners were encountering it.
What the historical sources miss entirely is any discussion of the legal frameworks within which such engines operated: feudal tenure obligations requiring military service with specified equipment, crown prerogatives over siege warfare, or the liability rules (if any) that attached to wall-destruction in medieval English law. A researcher seeking that context must look beyond these dictionary entries to primary feudal records, the plea rolls, or specialized scholarship on medieval military law.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs to medieval English legal history and has no recognized meaning in any modern common law or civil law jurisdiction. It is not a term of art in Scots law, American law, or any contemporary legal system.