Definition
Bussellus is a Latin and Law French term used in old English law to denote the bushel, a standard unit of dry measure. The bussellus consisted of eight gallon measures of wheat (octo jalonatæ frumenti). It appears in medieval legal texts as both a unit of measurement and a subject of royal standardization, with official bushel, gallon, and ell standards required to be stamped with the king's iron seal (sigillo domini Regis ferreo).
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A bushel is a unit of dry volume, used in agriculture and commerce, equal to 8 gallons or 4 pecks in imperial and U.S. customary systems.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A bushel is a dry measure containing four pecks, or eight gallons, used for grain, fruit, and other dry commodities.
The ordinary bushel and the bussellus are functionally related but are not identical concepts. The legal significance of bussellus lies not in the volume itself but in its status as a royally regulated standard — a matter of public law and enforcement rather than commercial custom. A researcher encountering bussellus in a medieval English legal text is reading about a Crown prerogative over weights and measures, not merely a unit of farm trade.
Why It Matters in Research
Bussellus is a term almost entirely confined to medieval English legal sources, particularly the Fleta (a late-thirteenth-century legal treatise) and statutes of weights and measures. Researchers will encounter it in manuscript sources, Latin legal texts, and early statutory materials relating to the regulation of trade and commerce under royal authority.
Several research traps apply. First, variant spellings are common in manuscript sources: bussellus, bussellum, busselli, and contracted forms all appear. Searches limited to a single spelling will miss relevant passages. Second, the term sits at the intersection of multiple subject areas — commercial regulation, royal prerogative, and agrarian law — so corpus searches should cross-reference materials on assizes of bread and ale, statutes of the staple, and market regulation. Third, do not conflate bussellus with butticella or butta, related but distinct terms in the same family; Burrill traces the word's contraction from butticellus, and those parent terms carry different meanings in other legal contexts (see BUTTA).
The standardization requirement — that measures be stamped with the king's iron seal — connects bussellus directly to the broader medieval English framework of royal assizes governing not only weights and measures but prices and quality standards. Researchers working on the history of economic regulation or the development of English administrative law will find bussellus a useful entry point into that statutory tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only major historical legal dictionary to provide a substantive entry for bussellus, and its treatment is compact but precise. Burrill correctly identifies the term as Law French contracted from Latin diminutives, ties it to the Fleta, and reproduces the key statutory formula regarding royal sealing of standard measures. The Fleta citations (lib. 2, c. 8; lib. 2, c. 73, § 3; lib. 2, c. 12, § 1) are the primary textual anchors for this term in the legal literature.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the broader statutory context. The fragment Burrill quotes — "Standardum busselli, galonæ et ulnæ sigillo domini Regis ferreo signentur" — is drawn from the Statute of Measures (Statutum de Mensuris), a document associated with the reign of Edward I, which systematized English weights and measures as part of a wider commercial reform program. No historical dictionary traces bussellus through the full arc of that statutory history, leaving researchers to pursue those connections independently through primary sources.
Other major historical dictionaries — Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, Black's Law Dictionary in its early editions — do not include bussellus as a separate entry, treating the subject, if at all, under more general discussions of weights and measures or under the English term bushel. Burrill's entry thus stands as the principal secondary reference.
Jurisdictional Note
Bussellus is specific to medieval English law and has no direct counterpart in Scots, civil law, or American legal traditions. American legal materials addressing the bushel do so entirely under that English term and within statutory or commercial contexts far removed from the royal-seal framework of the medieval English sources.