Definition
In old English legal records, a canna is a unit of linear measurement used in surveying and the measurement of land or distance. The term is a Latinized form denoting a rod or cane used as a measuring standard. Its precise length varied by locality and period, making it an imprecise unit by modern standards. It appears chiefly in medieval and early modern conveyancing records, surveys, and cadastral documents where land dimensions were recorded in the terminology of the day.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A measure of length in Italy, varying from six to seven feet.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A measure of length in Italy, varying from six to seven feet. See Cane, 4.
The common usage — whether historical or modern — fixes the canna as an Italian unit of approximately six to seven feet. The legal usage in English records is broader and less precise: it denotes any rod-like measuring instrument or the unit derived from it, without anchoring to a fixed Italian standard. A researcher encountering canna in an English legal document should not assume the Italian measure applies.
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Why It Matters in Research
The principal research trap with canna is dimensional instability. Because the term means "rod" at its root, the actual length it represents in any given document depends entirely on local custom and the period of the record. A canna in a Sicilian notarial record is not the same as a canna appearing in a medieval English survey or a post-Conquest Latin conveyance. Researchers working with land records — especially in manorial surveys, inquisitions post mortem, or ecclesiastical estate documents — should treat any measurement in canna as locality-specific until corroborated by contextual evidence or a local metrology source.
The term also appears in the company of other archaic linear measures such as pertica (perch), virga (rod), and ulna (ell), all of which share the conceptual ancestry of a physical rod used for pacing or measuring. Conflating these units produces significant errors in attempts to reconstruct historical plot sizes or boundaries.
For corpus researchers: the Burrill entry is minimal and routes through Cowell's Interpreter, which is the deeper reference for this term. Any Law Mind corpus search on medieval measurement vocabulary should pair canna with pertica, virga, and related terms to capture the full range of rod-based units appearing in Latin legal texts.
The fragment in the Burrill entry — referencing "cannot" and Lord Ellenborough C. J., 8 East, 416 — appears to be a typographical artifact of dictionary typesetting, where the tail end of a prior entry bled into the canna entry. It has no connection to the legal meaning of canna and should be disregarded.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is sparse: "In old records. A rod, in measures of ground or distance," with a single citation to Cowell. This is consistent with Burrill's general treatment of archaic Latinate measurement terms — minimal definition, immediate referral to the glossarists. Cowell's Interpreter (various editions) and Spelman's Glossarium are the more developed sources for this class of term, and Burrill effectively defers to them.
The Latin dictionary tradition confirms the root meaning: canna as reed or cane, extended metaphorically to reed-pipes and small vessels. The legal usage is a natural extension — a reed or cane as a physical measuring rod, then the unit defined by that rod. This etymology is common to the whole family of "rod" measurement terms across medieval European legal Latin.
No significant divergence exists among historical dictionary sources on the basic meaning. The divergence is purely quantitative: no source fixes a precise English legal length for the canna, because none existed uniformly.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term is most likely to appear in English records written in legal Latin, particularly pre-seventeenth century. In continental European (especially Italian and southern French) legal documents, the canna was a more formalized unit with locally fixed standards. Researchers should not import continental precision into English legal records where the term's application was looser.
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