Definition
A Law French term from old English law referring to the Elms, a location near Smithfield in London that served as a place of public execution before the designation of Tyburn as the principal execution site. The term appears in historical legal and administrative records relating to criminal punishment and the geography of medieval London's penal practice.
Why It Matters in Research
Homeaus is a narrow toponym of interest primarily to legal historians and scholars working with early English criminal records, plea rolls, or chronicles touching on capital punishment. Researchers should be aware that the term functions as a place name embedded in legal Latin and Law French sources rather than as a substantive legal concept with doctrine attached to it. It will surface in records predating the rise of Tyburn as London's dominant execution site — placing it roughly in the medieval period — and its appearance in a document can assist in dating that document or the practice it describes.
The chief trap for researchers is treating Homeaus as a generic legal term when it is in fact a specific toponym. Its presence in a source signals geographic and temporal context: pre-Tyburn London, likely thirteenth to fifteenth century criminal proceedings or narratives. Because the term is Law French in origin, it may appear in variant spellings across manuscript sources, and researchers relying on printed transcriptions should be alert to editorial normalization that may obscure those variants.
Burrill's attribution to Kelham points to Robert Kelham's Glossary of Norman French (1779) as the proximate secondary source. Researchers seeking the underlying primary evidence should trace the reference chain through Kelham rather than treating Burrill as the originating authority.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole dictionary source consulted here, and it offers only a brief notice: Law French, old English law, the Elms near Smithfield, place of execution before Tyburn, with attribution to Kelham. This is characteristic of how historical legal dictionaries treated archaic toponyms — minimal glossing, single-source attribution, no doctrinal elaboration.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any discussion of the legal significance of the site itself: whether Homeaus was designated by royal warrant, how it related to the jurisdiction of particular courts, or what procedural machinery governed executions carried out there. Those questions would require primary source research beyond the lexicographical tradition. Researchers should not assume that the brevity of the dictionary entry reflects the full historical record; it reflects the limits of what legal lexicographers prioritized.