BULTELLUM

Definition

A Latin term from old English law with two related meanings: (1) the act of bolting or sifting grain after it has been ground, used to separate flour from bran and to grade the resulting meal by fineness; and (2) the sieve or bolting cloth itself used in that process, the particular instrument indicating the degree of fineness to which grain was processed. The term appears in manorial and agricultural legal contexts, where the quality and grade of grain products processed on a lord's mill could carry legal significance for obligations owed by tenants or for the measurement of renders in kind. ---

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current entry. "Bolt" as a verb survives in specialized milling contexts to mean the sifting of flour through a fine cloth or sieve. Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To bolt: "To sift or pass through a sieve, so as to separate the coarser from the finer particles; as, to bolt meal." The bolting cloth was the sieve used for this purpose. The legal meaning does not sharply diverge from the common milling sense, but the legal term bultellum matters as a term of art in documentary and manorial records precisely because it specified both the process and the instrument as legally measurable standards. When a document references de eodem bultello — of the same bolting — it is establishing a quality standard with legal force, not merely describing a kitchen task. ---

Why It Matters in Research

Researchers encountering bultellum in medieval English legal manuscripts, court rolls, or manorial surveys should treat it as a term of measurement and standard-setting rather than simple agricultural description. The phrase preserved in Fleta — de eodem blado et eodem bultello, meaning of the same grain and the same bolting — indicates that obligations rendered in flour or meal were legally tied to a specific grade of processing. Variation in the bolting, whether coarser or finer than the stipulated standard, could affect the legal sufficiency of a render or payment. The term will appear almost exclusively in Latin-language sources from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, primarily in manorial records, custumals, and legal treatises concerned with mill rights and agricultural tenure. Fleta, the late thirteenth-century legal treatise, is the primary doctrinal source. Researchers working in this corpus should also consult surrounding manorial vocabulary — terms governing mill suit (suit of mill), multure (the toll taken by a miller), and the various grades of grain — because bultellum does not appear in isolation but as part of a cluster of interrelated milling and tenure obligations. There is no modern survival of this term in active legal use. Its appearance in a document is a reliable indicator of medieval manorial or agricultural law, and a researcher encountering it in a later document should suspect either deliberate archaism or direct transcription from an older source. ---

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical legal dictionary source for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill's entry is concise and accurate: it identifies both meanings (the act of bolting and the sieve itself), supplies the key illustrative phrase from Fleta, and notes the French parallel form bultel. Burrill does not elaborate on the legal consequences of bultellum as a standard of measurement, limiting the entry to definition and citation. No broader doctrinal discussion appears in Burrill beyond the Fleta reference. Researchers needing fuller context will need to consult Fleta directly (Book II, Chapter 9, Section 1) and related medieval agricultural law sources. The entry's brevity reflects the term's narrow functional scope: it was a precise technical term with a limited legal role rather than a concept with extensive doctrinal development. ---

Jurisdictional Note

Bultellum is specific to medieval English law and appears in the context of English manorial tenure and mill obligations. It has no meaningful equivalent in Scottish, Irish, or continental civil law traditions for purposes of cross-jurisdictional research. ---

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