Definition
An archaic Latin term meaning "head" or "the head." A variant spelling of caput, used in medieval and early legal documents, particularly in descriptions of land boundaries and forest perambulations. In practice, capud appears in metes-and-bounds descriptions to denote the uppermost or leading point of a geographic feature — the head of a wood, the head of a stream, the summit of a ridge — serving as a fixed terminal or starting point in the delineation of property or jurisdictional limits.
Common Confusion
Capud and caput are the same word. Capud is simply an older orthographic form; researchers encountering either spelling in a source should treat them as identical in meaning. Neither should be confused with cauda (tail or lower end), which describes the opposite terminal point in boundary descriptions.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval English land records, forest rolls, or perambulation documents will encounter capud as a boundary marker term. Its significance is entirely positional: it locates a point of origin or terminus in a physical description. Because forest perambulations were periodically redrawn and disputed, the precise identification of a capud — the head of a wood, for instance — could be legally consequential in establishing the extent of royal forest jurisdiction or private landholding.
The term appears almost exclusively in Latin record sources predating the gradual shift to English in legal instruments. After that transition, capud disappears from practical usage, replaced by plain English equivalents. Researchers using Law Mind sources should expect to find capud only in the oldest strata of the corpus — forest records, plea rolls, and charter materials from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries — and should cross-reference caput entries in any Latin legal glossary when the term requires further context.
One navigational trap: because capud is a positional descriptor rather than a term of legal art with independent doctrinal content, it will not appear as a headword in most later legal dictionaries. Its absence from Bouvier, Black, and similar nineteenth-century American references is not an oversight; by that period the term had been functionally obsolete for centuries. Burrill preserves it specifically because his dictionary draws heavily on older English record sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this entry, and its treatment is appropriately minimal. Burrill identifies capud as an old form of caput and illustrates its use with two references drawn from the Rotuli Perambulationis Forestae (Forest Perambulation Rolls) of 29 Edward I: "Ad capud bosci" (at the head of the wood) and "Usque ad summum capud de Akemere" (up to the highest head of Akemere). Both examples confirm the term's function as a boundary-point descriptor in forest administration documents.
No other historical dictionary in the standard legal reference tradition appears to have given capud a separate entry; it is treated elsewhere, when treated at all, as a mere spelling variant under caput. Burrill's decision to list it independently reflects his orientation toward English record practice and his awareness that researchers encountering the term in original sources might not immediately resolve it to caput.