Definition
An archaic Law French spelling variant of *cinque*, meaning five. The term appears in early legal manuscripts and register entries as an alternative orthographic form, carrying no independent legal significance beyond its numerical value. It is encountered almost exclusively in formulaic or tabular contexts within medieval and early modern English legal records.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a paleographic and orthographic trap, not a substantive legal concept. Researchers working with manuscript sources, plea rolls, or early printed registers may encounter *cynk* where a number is expected and fail to recognize it as the numeral five. Misreading the term — or failing to resolve it against its Latin and French equivalents (*quinque*, *cinq*, *cinque*) — can produce errors in transcription, chronology, and document interpretation.
The principal research value of this entry is recognition: if you encounter *cynk* in a pre-1700 English legal document, you are reading a numerical designation, not a substantive legal term. The Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig.) citation in Burrill places it squarely in the context of writ registers, where numerical forms were used in formulaic writs to specify days, years, or other counted quantities.
Burrill's citation to Reg. Orig. 72 suggests the term appeared as part of a rule or standard form (*regula*) — meaning this was not an isolated scribal idiosyncrasy but a recognized variant spelling in formal legal drafting. Researchers consulting early writ registers should treat *cynk*, *cinque*, *sank*, and related forms as interchangeable for purposes of numerical interpretation.
No modern legal usage survives. The term does not appear in American or post-1700 English legal materials in any functional sense.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole historical legal dictionary source available for this term, and his entry is deliberately spare: *"L. Fr. An old form of writing cinque. Reg. Orig. 72, regula. A"* — the entry appears truncated, likely indicating a cross-reference or continuation that was cut in the available text. The entry nonetheless confirms two things: (1) the term is classified as Law French; and (2) it had enough currency in the formal register tradition to merit acknowledgment in a legal dictionary.
No other historical legal dictionaries — including Bouvier, Black, or Tomlin — are known to carry independent entries for *cynk*. Its omission from those sources is itself informative: the term was archaic even by the nineteenth century and survived only as a curiosity of paleographic interest. Burrill's inclusion reflects his broader project of cataloguing obsolete and foreign-language terms that appear in the early English legal records, a function his dictionary performs more systematically than most of its contemporaries.
The historical record offers no divergence to synthesize — this is a case where a single source says what little needs to be said.
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