Definition
"Hou" is a Latin abbreviation appearing in medieval English legal records, most commonly as a contracted form of terms beginning with "hous-" or "host-" — particularly in the context of custodial and household offices. In Burrill's usage, it appears in the compound phrase "Custodes hostiorum," denoting door-keepers or gatekeepers attached to courts or great establishments. The term has no independent legal meaning in modern practice and functions solely as a historical marker within medieval institutional records.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Abbreviation for Houston, a city in Texas.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded as a distinct entry; subsumed within "house" and related forms.
The gap here is archival rather than conceptual. A modern researcher encountering "hou" in a document will almost certainly read it as a geographic abbreviation, whereas in medieval Latin legal records it is a scribal contraction with a wholly unrelated institutional meaning. The risk is not confusion between legal and common definitions — it is invisibility: the term will not register as legally significant to a researcher unfamiliar with Latin contractional forms.
Why It Matters in Research
This term matters almost exclusively to researchers working in medieval English legal records, particularly those consulting Latin manuscripts, Fleta, or statutes from the Edwardian period (late 13th century). The reference point in Burrill is narrow: Statute of Westminster II, chapter 44, and Fleta, book 2, chapter 39, both of which address the administration of courts and the officers assigned to them, including door-keepers (custodes hostiorum).
Researchers should be alert to two practical traps. First, scribal abbreviation in medieval Latin sources is inconsistent — "hou" may represent "hostiorum," "hospitium," or other forms depending on context, and no single expansion should be assumed without consulting surrounding text and editorial notes. Second, Burrill's treatment is a passing gloss rather than a developed entry, meaning the corpus evidence for this term is thin. Researchers should not treat Burrill's brief notation as authoritative on the full range of the term's medieval use.
For those building out a picture of medieval court administration, "hou" as used here connects to a broader network of custodial office-holders whose roles were defined by the household administration statutes of Edward I. Cross-referencing Fleta directly is advisable, as Burrill's citation is accurate but stripped of context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry, and his treatment is minimal — a three-line gloss identifying "custodes hostiorum" as door-keepers and pointing to two primary sources. He does not analyze the term, trace its evolution, or distinguish its use across different institutional settings.
What Burrill's entry does accomplish is preserving the Latin phrase and its statutory anchor, which is useful precisely because the term would otherwise disappear entirely from modern legal lexicons. No other standard historical legal dictionary (Black's, Bouvier, Tomlin) appears to have treated "hou" as a distinct entry, suggesting Burrill caught something narrow specialists need and generalists have passed over.
The limitation is real: researchers who need more than the bare identification of door-keepers as a recognized court office will have to go directly to Fleta and the Westminster statutes, as Burrill provides no analytical scaffolding.
Jurisdictional Note
Relevant exclusively to English legal history. No counterpart in American, Scottish, or continental European legal traditions. Researchers working in Anglo-American legal history will encounter this term only if reaching back to medieval Latin sources predating the common law's consolidation in English-language form.