Definition
A head covering. In historical English legal usage, capititium refers to a covering for the head as regulated by sumptuary statutes — laws that prescribed the dress, fabric, and adornments permitted to persons of various social ranks and degrees. The term appears in St. 1 Hen. IV and other medieval and early modern English statutes governing apparel.
Why It Matters in Research
Capititium is a narrow, historically bounded term with no modern legal application. Researchers will encounter it only in the context of English sumptuary legislation, particularly statutes from the late medieval and early Tudor periods. The term carries no independent doctrinal weight; its significance is entirely referential — it identifies a regulated item of dress within a broader statutory scheme.
When researching sumptuary law, note that these statutes organized social hierarchy through clothing regulation, so the legal meaning of capititium cannot be understood in isolation from the rank of the person required or forbidden to wear it. The statutes were enforced unevenly and largely fell into disuse by the seventeenth century, which means capititium will rarely appear in case law or equity proceedings and is almost exclusively a statutory term.
Researchers using historical indexes or digests should be alert to inconsistent Latinization across manuscript and printed sources. Variant spellings or abbreviations in older records may obscure the connection to the statutory references. Jacob's Law Dictionary, cited by both Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence as the proximate source for this entry, is itself drawing on antiquarian legal scholarship rather than active practice, which indicates the term was already treated as archaic by the time of the major English legal dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in complete agreement, with Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Rapalje & Lawrence all reproducing essentially the same definition, each tracing the term to Jacob's Law Dictionary and to St. 1 Hen. IV. The uniformity here reflects copying from a common source rather than independent verification — a pattern common in historical legal lexicography for obscure terms. None of the dictionaries elaborate on the statutory context, the types of persons regulated, or the penalties attached, which limits their usefulness beyond basic identification of the term.
The citation to "St. 1 Hen. IV" (1 Henry IV, c. 1399–1400) places capititium within the English legislative tradition of sumptuary control that stretched from Edward III through the reign of Elizabeth I. Jacob's Law Dictionary (various editions from the early eighteenth century onward) served as a standard authority for archaic statutory terms, and its influence on later compilers accounts for the verbatim repetition across dictionaries published decades apart.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any indication of which classes of persons were permitted or prohibited from wearing particular head coverings, what materials or forms were regulated, or how the term related to contemporaneous Latin vocabulary in non-legal ecclesiastical or administrative usage.
Jurisdictional Note
Capititium is exclusively a term of English statutory law. It has no reception in American law and will not appear in any American legislative or judicial materials.