Definition
A Latin term appearing in old English land records, denoting a butt or small measure of land — typically a short strip of ground, often found at the end of a field where a plough turned, leaving an irregular or truncated parcel. Appears in historical documents as *buttum terræ* (a butt of land). The term is purely descriptive of a unit or parcel of land defined by its shape or position within an open-field agricultural system rather than by any fixed acreage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *buttum* in medieval or early modern English land records should treat it as a field-unit term rather than a standardized measure of area. Its value lies in identifying the physical character of a parcel — a short, irregular end-strip — rather than conveying a precise or universally consistent quantity of land. Unlike *acre*, *rood*, or *perch*, *buttum* carried no fixed legal measurement; its meaning was inherently local and contextual, tied to the layout of the open-field system in a particular manor or village.
The primary trap for researchers is treating *buttum* as equivalent to a defined acreage. Two records from different manors using the term may describe parcels of materially different sizes. Cross-reference with local surveys, terriers, and field maps where available to reconstruct actual dimensions.
Burrill cites the term as drawn from *Carta M. de Sibbeford* (a charter of the manor of Sibford), itself preserved in Thomas Blount's *Fragmenta Antiquitatis* (or his glossarial work on tenures and terms). Researchers working with Blount as a secondary source should be aware that Blount's compilations, while valuable, drew on highly localized documents and may not support generalizations about national usage. The term is unlikely to appear in formal pleading records or common law court documents; its habitat is the manorial survey, the private charter, and the estate record.
For corpus researchers in Law Mind, *buttum* is a signal term: its presence in a document is a reliable indicator of manorial or agrarian context, pre-enclosure land tenure, and Old or Middle Latin record-keeping conventions. It should direct research toward the manorial law and feudal tenure portions of the corpus rather than toward common law property doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary — and, for practical purposes, the only — historical legal dictionary source for this term. His entry is terse: *"In old records. A butt or measure of land; (buttum terræ.)"* with the single citation to *Carta M. de Sibbeford* via Blount. No elaboration on dimensions or regional usage is offered.
The brevity of the entry reflects the term's status: it is a relic of conveyancing and agrarian description, not a term of art generating doctrinal content. Burrill includes it as a service to readers encountering it in archival materials rather than as a concept bearing legal weight of its own. No other major historical legal dictionary — not Jacob's, not Tomlin's, not Black's early editions — carries a substantive entry for *buttum*, which itself underscores its narrow archival utility.
Blount's work, cited by Burrill, remains the closest thing to a primary glossarial authority on the term, though Blount's methodology was antiquarian rather than strictly legal.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to English manorial and agrarian records and has no recognized usage in Scots, Irish, or American legal traditions. Research relevance is confined to English land history, primarily pre-1700.