Definition
De moneta (Latin: "concerning money") is a collective designation for three English statutes enacted in the 20th year of the reign of Edward I, identified in historical legal sources as:
1. Statute De moneta, 20 Edw. I, st. 4
2. Statute De moneta parvum, 20 Edw. I, st. 5
3. Articuli de moneta, 20 Edw. I, st. 6
Together these statutes addressed the integrity of the coin of the realm, with particular force directed against the importation, circulation, and use of clipped and counterfeit money. In modern legal usage, the term is not a live doctrine but a bibliographic and historical reference — a shorthand label for this cluster of medieval monetary legislation.
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Why It Matters in Research
De moneta is primarily a citation tool rather than a substantive legal concept. Researchers encountering this phrase in historical English law sources, treatises on currency regulation, or early common law compilations should treat it as a pointer to a specific statutory cluster, not as a general principle with ongoing doctrinal force.
Several research traps apply:
First, the numbering and subdivision of early English statutes is notoriously inconsistent across editions. The "20 Edw. I" dating places these statutes in 1292. Editions of the Statutes of the Realm and older compilations may present these instruments under slightly different titles, chapter numbers, or groupings. Cross-checking against Reeves' History of the English Law (cited in Burrill) provides useful triangulation.
Second, the term de moneta appears in other Latin legal contexts with a different, non-statutory meaning — as a prepositional phrase modifying a pleading, writ, or action "concerning money." Researchers should be careful to distinguish the specific statutory reference from incidental use of the phrase in pleading records.
Third, for research into the history of counterfeiting, currency debasement, or royal prerogative over coinage in English constitutional history, these statutes form part of a longer documentary lineage. They predate and inform later English currency legislation and may appear in discussions of the crown's monetary authority alongside unrelated instruments. The connection to later common law treatment of forgery and coinage offenses is thematic, not doctrinal.
Fourth, the companion maxim immediately following this entry in Burrill — "De morte hominis nulla est cunctatio longa" — signals that historical dictionaries were arranged alphabetically by initial Latin phrase, so nearby entries in any source are alphabetical neighbors, not conceptually related terms.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary surviving reference point for this term in the American legal dictionary tradition. Burrill's treatment is brief and essentially bibliographic: it identifies the statutes by regnal year, assigns them their Latin title grouping, characterizes their subject matter as counterfeiting and clipped coin importation, and cites 2 Reeves' History of the English Law at page 228 as secondary authority.
No substantive divergence across dictionary sources can be assessed here because Burrill is the sole source in the corpus. The entry is faithful to the original statutory cluster and Reeves' characterization is consistent with the historical record of Edwardian monetary legislation. What Burrill does not provide — and what historical dictionaries of this era generally omit — is any analysis of how these statutes functioned in practice, what enforcement mechanisms they established, or how they related to the broader royal prerogative over coinage that English courts would later elaborate. Researchers requiring that depth must move from the dictionary entry to Reeves directly and from there to the statutes themselves.
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Jurisdictional Note
These statutes are English in origin and have no direct counterpart in American law. In jurisdictions that received English common law, the monetary offenses addressed by the De moneta statutes eventually passed into separate domestic currency and counterfeiting legislation. The term itself does not appear in American statutory or case law as an operative term.
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