Definition
GROSSA is a Latin term from old English law carrying two distinct senses:
1. A groat — a small coin of medieval England, typically worth four pence. In this monetary sense, grossa appears in early legal and ecclesiastical records as a unit of account or payment.
2. A gross — the quantity twelve dozen (144), used in commercial and legal contexts to describe bulk quantities of goods.
The related Law French form GROSSE (also GROS) means "great" or "large," and appears in compound legal phrases, most notably grosses dismes, meaning great tithes — the principal or major tithes (typically of grain, hay, and wood) as distinguished from lesser or small tithes.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering GROSSA in medieval English legal records must immediately determine which sense is intended. Context is decisive: a record involving payment or rent most likely uses grossa in the monetary sense (the groat); a record involving goods or quantities points toward the commercial gross; a record involving church revenues almost certainly involves the Law French construction grosses dismes.
The term is most likely to appear in Year Books, monastic cartularies, ecclesiastical court records, and early plea rolls — sources characterized by heavy Latin and Law French intermixing. Burrill's citations to the Year Books and Monasticon Anglicanum (Mon. Angl.) signal that primary occurrences are concentrated in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Researchers working in post-Reformation sources will rarely encounter grossa in active use; by that period, English-language equivalents had largely displaced it.
The Law French grosse/gros family is a distinct research thread. Grosses dismes generated substantial ecclesiastical litigation over which tithes qualified as "great" versus "small," and the distinction carried real economic and jurisdictional consequences — great tithes were often appropriated to monasteries or rectories, while small tithes went to vicars. Conflating the Latin grossa with the Law French grosse is an easy error in early sources where both languages appear on the same page.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source for this term, and its entry, though compact, captures the essential dual meaning. Burrill cites Cowell for the groat definition — a reliable authority for medieval English legal vocabulary — and cites the Monasticon Anglicanum and a plea roll (Pl. 173) for the gross-quantity meaning. For grosses dismes, Burrill points to the Year Books of the reign of Edward III, which is consistent with the term's active use in fourteenth-century ecclesiastical and common law disputes over tithes.
Historical dictionaries generally do not elaborate on grossa beyond these bare definitions. What they miss is the practical litigation context: the great/small tithes distinction was not merely taxonomic but jurisdictional, dividing the competence of ecclesiastical courts from common law courts in tithe disputes. Researchers seeking that dimension must move from dictionary sources to treatise literature on ecclesiastical law and tithes.
Jurisdictional Note
GROSSA is a term of English legal history and has no meaningful parallel in American law. Researchers encountering it will be working exclusively in English common law and ecclesiastical sources, primarily pre-seventeenth century.