Definition
An archaic Anglo-Saxon legal term meaning a wound or bodily injury. The term appears in early English legal texts and glossaries, where it denoted a physical wound inflicted upon a person. It has no operative role in modern law and survives only as a historical artifact in legal dictionaries and Old English legal scholarship.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering DOLG will find it almost exclusively in two contexts: glossaries of Anglo-Saxon law appended to early legal compilations, and dictionaries tracing the etymological roots of injury-related terminology in English common law. The term is not a research destination in itself but a signpost. Its presence in a historical source signals proximity to early Germanic legal concepts governing bodily harm, compensation for injury, and the wergild system — the framework by which Old English law assigned monetary value to wounds and deaths.
Researchers working in pre-Conquest English legal history should understand that Anglo-Saxon law addressed wounds through elaborate schedules of compensation tied to the nature and location of the injury. DOLG sits within that tradition. If you encounter it in a primary source, the surrounding text is likely concerned with tariffs of injury compensation rather than criminal punishment in the modern sense.
The term also illustrates a broader trap in historical legal dictionaries: extremely brief entries — here just four words — often reflect the limits of the dictionary's source rather than the limits of the concept. All three sources here cite Spelman, meaning each is drawing from the same well. A researcher should treat these entries as pointers to Sir Henry Spelman's glossarial work on Anglo-Saxon and medieval law, not as independent corroboration.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three sources — Black's Law Dictionary, Burrill's Law Dictionary, and Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) — give identical entries: "Sax. A wound. Spelman." The uniformity is not coincidental. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century legal dictionaries frequently reproduced one another, particularly for archaic terms with no living legal significance. The citation to Spelman refers to Sir Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum (published posthumously, 1664), the foundational glossary of Anglo-Saxon and medieval legal Latin terms. Spelman remains the authoritative historical source for terminology of this period, and his entry for DOLG is the origin point for every subsequent dictionary treatment.
The fact that no dictionary adds interpretive context beyond Spelman's gloss indicates that DOLG never developed a body of case law or doctrinal commentary in English legal literature. It was already a dead term by the time systematic legal dictionaries emerged.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Anglo-Saxon Law; Wergild; Bodily Harm (Historical)