Definition
Cippi is the Latin plural of cippus. In old English law, the term refers to the stocks — a restraining instrument used to confine the wrists or ankles of petty offenders as a form of corporal punishment or public humiliation. The device was typically fixed in a public place and served both punitive and deterrent purposes at the local or manorial level.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of cippus — a Roman stone pillar or post, used as a boundary marker, gravestone, or monument.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; cippus in classical usage referred to a short stone column or post, often funerary or commemorative.
The gap matters for researchers: the classical Roman sense of cippus as a stone pillar is entirely distinct from its medieval English legal application. In the English legal context, cippi refers specifically to the stocks as an instrument of punishment — not to any architectural or funerary structure. A researcher encountering cippi in a legal record should not import the Roman antiquarian meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
Cippi appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records, writs, and pleadings written in Law Latin. Its practical significance is narrow but precise: it identifies the stocks as both a piece of manorial property and an instrument of legally sanctioned punishment, and it surfaces in litigation where that property was damaged or the punishment was disputed.
The Burrill excerpt illustrates the operative context well — an action in which a defendant allegedly broke the abbot's stocks (cippos ipsius abbatis) in which a serf had been confined. This points researchers toward two document types: manorial court rolls, where lords exercised low justice including use of the stocks, and common law writs sounding in trespass vi et armis, where destruction of the stocks was actionable as damage to property.
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal sources should be alert to variant spellings. Burrill records the Law French form as cipps or ceps, and Latin records may render the singular as cippus or the plural as cippos as well as cippi. Optical character recognition errors in digitized manuscript sources are likely given the rarity of the term and its resemblance to other Latin words.
There is no modern legal usage. The term is a historical artifact tied to a form of punishment that was abolished in England well before the nineteenth century. It will not appear in contemporary statutory or case law research.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in close agreement. Black's (both editions) offers a brief functional definition — the stocks as a confinement instrument for petty offenders — without elaboration. Burrill provides the most useful entry: it supplies the Law French variants (cipps, ceps), embeds the term in an actual Latin legal excerpt, and gives a facing English translation that grounds the abstract definition in a real procedural context.
None of the sources explore the punishment's legal basis, the classes of offenders subject to it, or the jurisdictional framework (manorial, ecclesiastical, or royal) within which the stocks operated. Researchers needing that context must look beyond the dictionary shelf to works on manorial jurisdiction and medieval penal practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs exclusively to English legal history and reflects the exercise of local or manorial low justice. It has no counterpart in American law and does not appear in colonial American legal records in any systematic way.