Definition
The dignity, title, and formerly the office and jurisdiction attached to the rank of earl. In its original form, an earldom comprised three distinct components: a personal dignity, an administrative office with governing authority over a territory, and a landed estate corresponding to that territory. Over time, the jurisdictional and territorial elements were stripped away. An earldom today — in surviving English peerage practice — is a purely personal dignity: a heritable title of honor conferring rank and certain ceremonial privileges, but no governing power and no necessary connection to land.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The rank of being an earl; the territory controlled by an earl.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The jurisdiction of an earl; the territorial possessions of an earl; the status, title, or dignity of an earl.
Editorial note: Both common definitions retain the territorial element that legal history has discarded. A researcher relying on ordinary dictionary usage may assume an earldom implies land ownership or geographic control — an assumption accurate in medieval contexts but false for modern peerage. The legal sources are more precise: jurisdiction passed to the sheriff; territory detached from title; what remains is dignity alone.
Common Confusion
Earldom is sometimes conflated with comitatus, its Latin equivalent in older sources. The confusion matters because comitatus carried specific jurisdictional meaning — the county or shire under an earl's governance — while earldom, in later legal usage, shed that jurisdictional content entirely. Burrill's cross-reference to comitatus is the most useful signal that these terms once overlapped substantially but diverged as English county administration centralized under the Crown. Researchers encountering comitatus in medieval records should not assume the same meaning applies when earldom appears in post-medieval legal instruments.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a historical evolution case. Its research significance lies almost entirely in tracking what it used to mean versus what it came to mean — and knowing which era's sources you are reading.
In early medieval English law, earldom carried real legal weight: the earl held administrative authority, presided over courts, and derived income from the territory. Documents from this period may reference an earldom in ways that implicate property rights, jurisdictional disputes, franchise grants, or succession claims with concrete legal consequences.
By the time Blackstone was writing (1 Bl. Comm. 339, the citation common to all three dictionaries here), the transformation was already complete. The jurisdiction had passed to the sheriff. What remained was the dignity — a peerage title governed by letters patent, descent rules, and the law of honors rather than property law or administrative law in any functional sense.
Researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus should be alert to which side of this transition a given source falls on. A fifteenth-century treatise using earldom is not using it the same way Blackstone is. Chancery records, patent rolls, and plea rolls from the medieval period may require understanding the jurisdictional earldom to make sense of the dispute at hand.
One research trap: sources that use county and earldom interchangeably in early records. Because the earl's territory often gave rise to the county name (and because comitatus served both meanings), conflating the terms can obscure whether a document is discussing a title dispute or a territorial/jurisdictional one.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three dictionaries converge on the same essential point — dignity survives, jurisdiction does not — and all three cite or echo Blackstone as authority. The agreement is near-total on the modern legal position.
Burrill's is the most historically informative of the three. It explicitly names the three original components (dignity, office, land), cites 1 Lord Raymond 10, 13 for the proposition, provides the Latin equivalent (comitatus), and makes clear through its cross-references that a researcher needs to understand the earlier, fuller meaning to work with historical sources. Black's and Bouvier's are more compressed and track each other closely, offering the conclusion without the historical scaffolding Burrill supplies.
What all three dictionaries understate is the mechanism of transition — how jurisdiction moved to sheriffs, when, and under what legal authority. For research into that process, the dictionaries are starting points only; the substantive history lies in the plea rolls, administrative records, and constitutional history of the English county.
Jurisdictional Note
Earldom is a feature of English and, by extension, British peerage law. It has no meaningful equivalent in American law, which rejected hereditary titles. Researchers in American legal history will encounter the term only in the context of colonial land grants, property claims derived from Crown patents, or historical background material — not as an operative legal concept in American courts.