Definition
De monte acuto is a Latin locative phrase meaning "of" or "from the sharp mount" (or "of Montacute"), appearing in medieval English legal records as a surname designator or place-name identifier attached to a person's name. In the context of Bracton and other early common law texts, it functions as a toponymic surname — a descriptor identifying an individual by their place of origin or territorial association. It is not a substantive legal term denoting a doctrine, right, or procedural concept; it is instead a proper name element encountered in case references, plea rolls, and early legal authorities.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter de monte acuto primarily when tracing case references or named parties in Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae and similar early common law sources. Because medieval records routinely identified persons by place of origin using the Latin "de" construction, the same individual may appear under several variant forms across different manuscript traditions: de Monte Acuto, de Montacute, de Montaigu, or anglicized variants like Montagu or Montague. Failure to recognize these equivalences can cause a researcher to miss cross-references within the same corpus.
The critical navigational point is that Burrill's entry is not defining a legal doctrine — it is glossing a name. The entry is essentially a pointer: when Bracton uses "de monte acuto," the referent is a person associated with Montacute (a place in Somerset, England, with Norman French roots). Researchers using Bracton's folios 63b and 199b should search under all variant spellings when consulting indexes to plea rolls, the Curia Regis Rolls, or the early Year Books. Digitized Bracton projects (notably the Harvard Law School Bracton Online) index names inconsistently, and the Latin form may not map cleanly to the anglicized form in companion finding aids.
This term is also an example of a broader category of Burrill entries that function as glosses on proper names or abbreviations found in Bracton rather than as substantive legal definitions. Recognizing this category distinction prevents researchers from expecting doctrinal content where only a name identification exists.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's treatment is minimal by design. The entry reads essentially as a cross-reference gloss: "de monte acuto" = Montacute, citing Bracton at folios 63b and 199b, with the companion entry "de Pavilliano" (Peiton) appearing in the same note as a parallel example. This pairing suggests Burrill was identifying a class of toponymic surname constructions in Bracton rather than offering a standalone definition.
No other major historical law dictionaries — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Black's early editions — carry this term as a substantive entry, which is consistent with its character as a proper name gloss rather than a term of art. The absence from those sources is itself informative: the term has no independent doctrinal life outside its function as a person identifier in the Bracton text.