Definition
A small pit or hollow used for the production or storage of salt; specifically, a lesser or minor salt pit, as distinguished from a larger saltworks or principal salt-producing excavation. The term appears in English legal and manorial records as a descriptor of a particular type of salt-producing feature on land, relevant to questions of land tenure, rental obligations, and the valuation of estates.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will almost certainly find it in medieval or early modern English property records, manorial surveys, or documents relating to salt-producing regions — particularly areas of Cheshire, Worcestershire, and the English coastal marshes where salt production was economically significant and legally regulated. The term is highly localized in both geography and time; it does not appear in modern legal usage and should be treated as a term of art belonging to pre-modern English land law.
The primary trap for researchers is mistaking the term for a personal name or a Latin legal formula of broader significance. It is neither. It is a descriptive term of property — one that would affect how a parcel of land was assessed, what duties or rents attached to it, and how it was conveyed. When encountered in a deed, inquisition post mortem, or manorial extent, the term signals that the document concerns salt-producing land and that the associated legal obligations may differ from ordinary agricultural or pastoral holdings.
All three dictionary sources in the Law Mind corpus derive their definitions from a single authority: Cowell's Interpreter (1607). Researchers should be aware that this creates a citation chain rather than independent verification. The definition has been copied forward rather than independently developed, meaning there is no substantive expansion of the term's legal significance across the sources. If deeper research is required, Cowell's original entry is the primary source, and manorial records from salt-producing counties are the appropriate documentary corpus.
The term is unlikely to appear in case law or statutory materials. Its natural habitat is lexicographic and archival: law dictionaries, land surveys, and glossaries of manorial terms.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources — Black's Law Dictionary (1st Ed.), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) — offer identical or near-identical definitions: "a hoke, hole, or lesser pit of salt," uniformly attributed to Cowell. There is no divergence, development, or supplementary commentary across the sources. This uniformity reflects that each dictionary was drawing on the same single lexicographic antecedent rather than conducting independent legal or historical analysis.
Cowell's Interpreter, the origin of the definition, was a legal glossary of English, Latin, and Norman-French terms appearing in English law. Its definitions were descriptive of historical usage rather than prescriptive of contemporary legal standards. Researchers should treat the definition accordingly: it tells us what the term meant to a seventeenth-century English legal glossarist, not what it means in any operational legal context.
Notably, none of the historical dictionary sources provides context for how the term functioned in actual legal proceedings, what rights or duties attached to land so described, or how it related to the broader law of saltworks and mineral rights in English land law. This is a gap that the dictionaries cannot fill; primary archival sources must be consulted for that level of analysis.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English law and has no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It reflects the particular economic and tenurial conditions of medieval and early modern England and should not be applied or analogized to other legal systems.
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