Definition
A cook; a person employed in the preparation of food, particularly within a household or institutional setting. The term appears in medieval Latin legal records as a designation for an individual's occupational status or role, equivalent to the English "cook." In legal contexts, the term surfaces primarily in records of manorial service obligations, household accounts, and occasionally in descriptions of personal status or occupation in pleadings and writs.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Brya ebenus, a Caribbean flowering tree valued for its dense, dark hardwood, sometimes called cocuswood or Jamaican ebony.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately listed; the botanical sense was in circulation but not prominently defined.
The gap between common and legal meaning is total. In legal records, cocus is exclusively an occupational designation — a cook — drawn from medieval Latin. The botanical meaning (a hardwood tree) developed independently and has no connection to the legal usage. A researcher encountering cocus in a medieval Latin document or Year Book excerpt should not import the modern botanical meaning.
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Why It Matters in Research
Cocus is a term researchers are unlikely to search for directly; it surfaces when transcribing or reading medieval Latin legal records, manorial rolls, or Bracton-era materials where occupational designations appear in Latin rather than English. Burrill's single entry — "Coke, or Cook. Bract. fol. 437 b." — is a pointer to Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, and researchers working with that text should be alert to cocus as a standard occupational label rather than a term of legal art.
The practical trap is misreading: cocus can be visually confused with related Latin terms in manuscript hands (caucus, coccus, and similar forms appear in different legal and natural-history contexts). When transcribing medieval Latin records, confirm context before settling on a translation.
Because occupational designations in medieval records often carried legal weight — affecting villeinage status, service tenure, and household obligations — correctly identifying cocus as "cook" rather than treating it as an unknown proper noun can matter for interpreting a record's substantive content.
Researchers in the Law Mind corpus should note that cocus as an independent headword is thin across historical dictionaries; Burrill is the primary legal dictionary source, and its entry is essentially a one-line gloss. Broader context must be supplied by Latin legal dictionaries and medievalist reference works outside the standard common-law dictionary shelf.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal: "Coke, or Cook. Bract. fol. 437 b." This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Latin occupational terms — a brief vernacular equivalent and a single source reference. No definition of legal significance beyond occupational identification is offered.
The reference to Bracton (fol. 437 b) anchors the term firmly in thirteenth-century English legal Latin. Bracton's text uses cocus in the context of household personnel, consistent with the standard medieval Latin sense. No other major common-law dictionary on the standard shelf (Bouvier, Black's, Jacob's, Tomlin's) carries cocus as an independent entry, which confirms this is a term of record rather than a term of legal doctrine.
Historical dictionaries as a class do not add analytical depth here. Cocus is a label, not a legal concept.
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