Definition
A Latin term appearing in old English legal records meaning barley. Used in medieval and early modern documents — particularly manorial records, agricultural surveys, and rent rolls — to denote barley as a commodity or as a unit of render. The term carried two recognized subcategories in historical usage: hordeum palmale (beer barley, a higher-quality grain used in brewing) and hordeum quadragesimale (common barley, the ordinary agricultural variety). The distinction mattered because different grades of barley carried different values and obligations in feudal agricultural arrangements.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Hordeum palmale — Beer barley. The finer grade, used in brewing, and correspondingly more valuable in renders, rents, and exchange.
Hordeum quadragesimale — Common or Lenten barley. The ordinary field barley used for general agricultural purposes. The name likely reflects an association with the forty-day Lenten fast period, or with ordinary seasonal cultivation cycles.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering hordeum in the Law Mind corpus will find it almost exclusively in materials related to feudal tenure, manorial administration, estate management, and agricultural rent obligations. The term is a marker of archaic record-keeping rather than a term of legal doctrine, and it functions as a commodity descriptor rather than a legal concept in its own right.
The key research trap is the subcategory distinction. A record specifying hordeum palmale describes a different and more valuable obligation than one specifying hordeum quadragesimale. Treating all hordeum references as interchangeable will distort any analysis of the actual economic content of historical rents or dues. When the type of barley is unspecified, the grade cannot be assumed.
Researchers should also note that barley renders appear in a range of document types — feoffments, court rolls, custumals, extent records, and lease agreements — and hordeum may appear alongside other grain terms such as avena (oats), siliginis or sigalum (rye), and triticum (wheat). Understanding hordeum in context means understanding the full grain vocabulary of the document in which it appears.
The authority cited across all three dictionary sources for this term is Blount — Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary (1670), one of the earliest English-language legal dictionaries and a standard reference for archaic and Latin terms in old records. Researchers relying on the definition should be aware they are working from a seventeenth-century secondary source interpreting even older primary materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term, and all three reproduce what is essentially the same entry sourced from Blount. There is no meaningful divergence among the shelf sources. None of the entries attempt to place the term within a broader legal doctrine, which is appropriate — hordeum is a term of record vocabulary, not of substantive law.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the practical context in which barley renders arose: the system of customary agricultural tenure and villein service obligations that generated this vocabulary. Researchers seeking that context will need to look beyond the dictionary shelf to manorial history and agrarian legal history sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Manorial Tenure; Agricultural Renders and Feudal Obligations; Latin Terms in Old English Records.