Definition
Cendulz is an archaic legal term denoting roofing shingles — specifically, thin, flat tiles or pieces of material used to cover the roof of a house. The term appears in early property and building law contexts to describe this form of roofing material as a distinct category of construction component.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter cendulz almost exclusively in medieval and early modern property records, manorial accounts, building contracts, and conveyancing documents. The term is effectively extinct in modern legal usage, having been entirely displaced by plain English equivalents. Its significance in the corpus is narrow but specific: when it appears, it is functioning as a term of description in inventories, leases, or repair covenants — contexts where the physical condition or materials of a structure were legally relevant to obligations between landlord and tenant, grantor and grantee, or lord and lessee.
The practical research trap is misreading the term as a proper name or place name given its unfamiliar form. In historical manuscript sources, variant spellings may appear. Because Black's 2nd edition traces the definition to Cowell — John Cowell's legal dictionary The Interpreter (1607) — the term's documented usage runs through the early modern English legal lexicon, not Roman or civil law sources. Researchers working backward from Black's should consult Cowell directly for any fuller contextual usage.
There are no known modern statutory or case law appearances of this term. Its value is almost entirely paleographic and historical.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the sole historical legal dictionary entry for this term, defining cendulz as tiles used to cover the roof of a house — that is, shingles — and attributing the definition to Cowell. The entry is brief and purely descriptive, functioning as a glossary entry for an obsolete building material term rather than a term of legal art with doctrinal content. No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus independently define this term, making Black's/Cowell the controlling reference. The absence of the term from later editions of Black's and from competing historical dictionaries confirms it fell out of active legal use without generating litigation or statutory interpretation.