Definition
An archaic English legal term for a valley. Hopcon appears in old English land law as a topographical descriptor used in deeds, grants, and conveyances to identify parcels of land by reference to natural features of the landscape. Like many such terms, it functioned as a term of location rather than a term of legal art — its meaning was geographic, not doctrinal.
The term is closely associated with HOPE, which carries the same meaning (valley) and appears more frequently in both legal and literary sources. Hopcon and Hope were used interchangeably in land descriptions, particularly in grants of rural or agricultural property where valleys, hills, moors, and watercourses served as boundary markers.
Common Confusion
The Black's 2nd Edition entry runs Hopcon (the topographical term) together with Hope as a precatory word in wills. These are entirely unrelated concepts. The geographic meaning of hope/hopcon (a valley) has no connection to the doctrinal question of whether "hope" in a will creates a precatory trust. A researcher encountering the combined entry in Black's 2nd Edition should treat the two discussions as independent entries that happen to share a heading, not as legally related concepts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering Hopcon in historical deeds, surveys, or conveyancing records should treat it as a geographic descriptor, not a legal term with operative significance. Its function is purely descriptive: it tells you where the land is, not what rights attach to it.
The practical research trap is misreading topographical terms as legal ones. Old English conveyancing documents are dense with place-name vocabulary — words like hopcon, moor, fen, lea, croft, and garth — that are geographic in origin and meaning but appear in formally legal instruments. Misidentifying these as terms of art can send a researcher in the wrong direction.
Because Hopcon is an archaic term rarely appearing outside of early English land records, it will surface primarily in pre-modern conveyancing documents, manorial records, and early surveys. It is unlikely to appear in American legal materials at all, given that American land law developed its own descriptive vocabulary (metes and bounds, then the rectangular survey system) independent of Old English topographical terminology.
Researchers working in English legal history who encounter hopcon should cross-reference against historical place-name dictionaries and dialect glossaries, not legal treatises, for fuller context.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree: Hopcon means a valley, with each citing Cowell's Interpreter (1607) as authority. The entry is brief in every source — a single line of definition with a single citation — reflecting the fact that this term carried no contested legal meaning and required no elaboration.
Black's 2nd Edition is the most useful of the three because it pairs Hopcon with Hope in the same entry, clarifying that both terms carry the same geographic meaning. The 2nd Edition also supplies the additional citation of Co. Litt. 4b (Coke on Littleton) for Hope, which gives the term greater common law authority than Cowell alone provides.
Notably, Black's 2nd Edition uses the Hope entry to venture into the separate question of "hope" as a precatory word in wills — a functionally unrelated legal question that shares only a word. The editorial decision to combine these in one entry is a source of potential confusion (see Common Confusion below). Neither Black's 1st Edition nor Bouvier addresses the precatory will usage under this heading.
No source offers any discussion of how hopcon functioned in actual litigation or conveyancing disputes, which reflects the term's essentially descriptive character.
Jurisdictional Note
Hopcon is an Old English term without any recognized application in American law. It may appear in early colonial land grants modeled on English conveyancing forms, but this is rare. For practical purposes, this term is confined to English legal history.