Definition
A barrel or cask. In old English legal usage, *cadus* (plural: *cadi*) referred to a vessel used to measure or contain liquids, most commonly oil or wine. The term appears in medieval pleadings and early common law records as a unit of both container and, by extension, liquid measure. Its primary legal significance was as a term of description in writs, pleadings, and conveyances where goods were inventoried or claimed by the barrel.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern English use; survives chiefly as a technical or historical term in classical and archaeological contexts, referring to a large jar or vessel used in antiquity for wine, oil, or other liquids.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately entered; the term was treated as a Latin borrowing used in scholarly or ecclesiastical contexts to mean a cask or tub.
The gap between common and legal usage here is primarily one of precision. In ordinary historical usage, *cadus* was a vague reference to any large vessel. In legal pleading, it functioned as a specific descriptive term requiring accurate identification of the goods at issue — misidentifying the container type could affect the validity of a writ or the description of a claimed quantity.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *cadus* in medieval English legal records should treat it as a term of pleading description rather than a term of art carrying substantive legal weight on its own. Its significance is contextual: it appears most often in actions for recovery of goods, customs records, and early commercial pleadings where the type and quantity of a commodity had to be precisely named.
Two practical traps arise. First, the term is easily overlooked as mere Latin filler when it is in fact a load-bearing descriptive word — a writ claiming *decem cados olei* (ten barrels of oil) would fail or require amendment if the vessel type or quantity were misstated. Second, *cadus* appears in texts that also use *dolium*, *amphora*, and *lagena* as vessel terms, each carrying different implied capacities. Conflating these in transcription or translation can distort the apparent scale of a commercial dispute or bequest.
For corpus researchers working in Bracton or early plea rolls, the term signals a goods-recovery or debt action involving liquid commodities. Cross-referencing with customs and exchequer records from the same period can clarify what a *cadus* of a particular commodity actually represented in volume and value at a given time and place.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal shelf source for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill defines *cadus* tersely as "a barrel," citing Townshend's *Placita Parliamentaria* and Bracton's *De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae*. The entry is illustrative rather than analytical — Burrill provides the Latin context (*decem cados olei*) without elaborating on the pleading mechanics or the range of commodities to which the term applied.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — not Bouvier, not Jacob, not Black's early editions — carry a standalone entry for *cadus*. This absence reflects the term's status as a dead Latin technical word rather than a living legal concept: by the time American legal dictionaries were being compiled in the nineteenth century, *cadus* had no operative meaning in common law pleading and was of purely antiquarian interest.
Researchers should note that Burrill's entry for *cadus* appears in close proximity to entries for *caedere* and *calangium*, which are unrelated terms. This is alphabetical adjacency only and carries no conceptual relationship.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is exclusively a feature of early English common law and civil law sources. It has no operative meaning in American law and does not appear as a functional legal term in any modern common law jurisdiction. Its relevance is confined to medieval English legal history and the interpretation of pre-modern writs and records.