Definition
In old English and medieval Latin legal usage, bursa means a purse or bag. The term appears in early English legal texts primarily as a descriptive word identifying a physical object — the purse carried on the person — rather than as a term of legal art with independent doctrinal content. Its principal legal relevance is in the compound phrase bursarum scissores (cutters of purses, or cutpurses), which identified a recognized category of thief in early English criminal law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A small fluid-filled sac located where a muscle or tendon slides across bone, reducing friction between moving surfaces. Also used in ornithology and biology for analogous pouch-like structures.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Any sac or saclike cavity, especially a synovial sac interposed between tendons and bony prominences.
The gap is complete. The anatomical meaning — now the term's dominant usage in English — has no connection to the legal meaning. A researcher encountering bursa in a legal source should not import any anatomical or biological sense; the legal use is purely the Latin for purse or bag, drawn directly from classical and medieval Latin.
Common Confusion
Bursa should not be confused with bourse, the French-derived term for a financial exchange or stock market, which derives from the same Latin root (the original bourse in Bruges reportedly took its name from the Van der Beurse family, whose sign was a purse). The words share etymology but diverged entirely in legal and commercial usage. A researcher working in mercantile law or financial history who encounters bourse is in entirely different territory from one encountering bursa in a criminal or property law context.
Why It Matters in Research
Bursa is not a term a researcher will encounter as a standalone doctrine or legal test. Its research value is almost entirely indexical: it signals the medieval or early common law stratum of a source, and it anchors the compound phrase bursarum scissores, which is the term with actual legal content.
Researchers working on the history of larceny, theft offenses, or pickpocketing in English law should treat bursa as a pointer to Fleta and Bracton, the two primary sources in which the term appears with legal significance. Fleta, lib. 1, c. 38, § 11 contains the reference to bursarum scissores in a criminal classification context; Fleta, lib. 2, c. 82, § 2 and lib. 6, c. 28, § 1 use bursa in the bag or receptacle sense. Bracton, fol. 84 is the parallel Bractonian reference. These are real texts, and the citations in Burrill are genuine guides to where the term does substantive work.
The practical trap: bursa appears rarely enough in legal sources that its presence in a document is itself a dating and provenance signal. Finding bursa in what purports to be an early English legal text suggests genuine medieval Latin drafting or, at minimum, a text working closely from Fleta or Bracton. It would be unusual in later common law sources.
No jurisdictional variation is meaningful here. This is a historical term of English legal Latin with no ongoing doctrinal life in American or modern English law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill and Black agree completely on the core definition: bursa means purse in Latin. Burrill adds substantially more texture, citing Spelman, Bracton, and Fleta to ground the term in actual usage, and identifying bursarum scissores as the legally operative compound. Black's entry is minimal — a one-line translation — which is appropriate given the term's limited independent doctrinal weight.
Neither dictionary attempts to treat bursa as a term of art, which is correct. Both recognize it as a Latin word that appears in legal texts rather than a legal concept in its own right. Burrill's citations to Fleta are the most useful historical material: they place the term in specific chapters of a real thirteenth-century English legal treatise, making verification straightforward for a researcher with access to the printed editions of Fleta.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the etymological connection to later commercial vocabulary (bourse, bursar, disburse), which falls outside their scope but is useful context for researchers tracing the word across different bodies of source material.