Definition
A Latin term of medieval English law denoting a hog or swine. The word appears in early legal records and glossaries as a technical descriptor for this class of livestock, carrying significance in property disputes, manorial accounts, tithes, and damages assessments where the precise identification of animals was legally material.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a terminological artifact of Latin-form pleading and manorial record-keeping, most likely to surface in medieval and early modern English legal documents — court rolls, surveys, extent records, and ecclesiastical tithe disputes — rather than in common law case reports. Researchers working in pre-modern agrarian law, manorial jurisdiction, or ecclesiastical property records should recognize the term as a Latinized form used by scribes to identify swine with technical precision, distinguishing hogs from other livestock categories that carried different valuations or tithe rates.
The term is almost never encountered in American legal sources. Its appearance in Bouvier signals its importance for understanding the English common law foundations from which colonial American law descended, but any researcher expecting to find it in American case law or statutes will be disappointed. Its research value is primarily paleographic and historical: recognizing the word on sight when reading Latin court rolls or manorial extents, rather than applying it to any living legal doctrine.
Note also the companion entry HOGHENHYNE, which Bouvier places immediately following. The two terms appear together in historical glossaries but are entirely unrelated in meaning — one describes an animal, the other describes a legal status assigned to a stranger guest under Saxon hospitality custom. Researchers should be careful not to conflate or conflate entries drawn from the same source passage.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's sole authority is Cowel — that is, John Cowell's *Interpreter* (1607), a legal glossary of considerable influence in both English and early American legal scholarship. Cowell functioned as a bridge between medieval Latin legal vocabulary and the practicing common lawyer, and Bouvier drew on him repeatedly for archaic and medieval terms.
No other historical legal dictionary in the standard shelf set independently defines *hoggus* or *hogictus*, which itself signals how narrow this term's documentary footprint is. Its survival into Bouvier's nineteenth-century compilation reflects Bouvier's comprehensive ambition to preserve the full historical vocabulary of Anglo-American law, not any continued practical relevance.
The term illustrates a broader pattern in medieval Latin legal drafting: common domestic animals were routinely Latinized in formal records — *bos* for ox, *equus* for horse, *ovis* for sheep — and swine were similarly formalized as *hoggus*, *porcus*, or *sus* depending on region, period, and scrivener convention. Researchers should not assume a single consistent Latin term for hog across all medieval English records.
Jurisdictional Note
Strictly historical English and medieval ecclesiastical law. No relevance to modern American or English jurisdictions as a term of art.