Definition
An archaic spelling variant of jetsam. In historical legal usage, jotsum refers to goods cast overboard from a ship in distress, which sink and remain submerged on the seabed, as distinguished from goods that float (flotsam) or are deliberately thrown overboard with a buoy or marker attached for later recovery (lagan or ligan). The term appears primarily in early English admiralty and common law sources as an orthographic variant rather than a distinct legal concept. All substantive legal meaning attaches to jetsam, the modern standard form.
Common Confusion
JOTSUM / JETSAM / FLOTSAM / LAGAN: These four terms are frequently conflated, both in popular usage and in older legal sources where spelling was inconsistent. The critical distinctions in admiralty law are: flotsam designates goods floating on the surface after a wreck without deliberate act; jetsam (jotsum) designates goods intentionally thrown overboard that have sunk; and lagan (also ligan) designates goods thrown overboard with a buoy or line attached so the owner may reclaim them. The legal significance of the distinction historically determined whether the Crown, the lord of the manor, or the original owner could claim the goods. Researchers encountering jotsum in a historical source should treat it as functionally identical to jetsam and apply the same doctrinal analysis.
Why It Matters in Research
Jotsum is a spelling artifact. Researchers encountering it in early English legal manuscripts, Year Books, or admiralty records should recognize immediately that it carries no independent doctrinal meaning and redirects entirely to jetsam. The instability of spelling in pre-modern legal texts means that the same source may use jotsum, jetsam, jettison, jectson, or other variants interchangeably, sometimes within a few pages of one another. Do not treat orthographic variation as substantive legal distinction.
The term matters for corpus navigation rather than doctrine. If you are searching a historical corpus for wreck-of-the-sea cases, salvage disputes, or Crown prerogative claims over maritime goods, you must run searches for multiple spelling variants — jotsum, jetsam, jetsom, flotsom, flotsam, lagan, ligan — or you will miss relevant records. Indexers of older materials did not always normalize these spellings, and Burrill himself cross-references jotsum directly to jetsam without elaboration, signaling that his readers were expected to follow the redirect rather than find independent content.
The wreck-of-the-sea doctrines in which jotsum/jetsam appear are primarily creatures of English prerogative and feudal tenure law, later codified in statutes governing salvage and wreck. The conceptual framework was largely stable from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, but the allocation of rights among the Crown, lords of the manor, and salvors shifted across that span. A researcher working on admiralty or property questions involving maritime wreck should track those shifts using jetsam as the primary entry point, with jotsum treated solely as a historical spelling variant that may appear in older primary sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not define jotsum independently. The entry reads simply: "See Jetsam." This terse cross-reference is the entirety of Burrill's treatment, confirming that even in the nineteenth century jotsum was understood as a variant spelling rather than a distinct term. Burrill offers no elaboration, no historical quotation, and no doctrinal content under this head.
The adjacent entries in Burrill — JOUR, JOR, JUR, JOER — are unrelated terms drawn from Law French (meaning day or a day, from Latin dies), included in the same alphabetical sequence by coincidence of spelling. Researchers should not infer any connection between jotsum and these Law French day-terms simply because they appear in proximity in the dictionary.
No substantive historical dictionary treatment of jotsum as an independent term has been identified. Its entire legal history is subsumed under jetsam.