Definition
An obsolete monetary unit of Anglo-Saxon England, valued at thirty pence. The manca (also rendered mancus) appears in early medieval English legal instruments, charters, fines, and property records as a unit of account or payment. It is no longer in circulation and carries no operative legal significance in modern law. Its relevance today is confined to the interpretation of historical legal documents, particularly those predating the Norman Conquest or dating from the early post-Conquest period.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A mancus, described as an old coin.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Refers the reader to the entry for Mancus, treating the two forms as equivalent.
The common and legal meanings are essentially identical here — both point to the same historical coin. The legal significance is not in a gap between common and legal meaning, but in recognizing the term as a unit of monetary obligation when it appears in early English legal records, where it carries specific quantitative weight (thirty pence) rather than serving as mere ornamental antiquarian language.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-Conquest or early Norman-era English legal sources — writs, land grants, Domesday-adjacent records, ecclesiastical charters, or manorial surveys — will occasionally encounter manca or mancus as a stated sum in a fine, gift, or obligation. Misreading the term or treating it as a generic reference to money rather than a specific denomination can distort the economic or legal significance of the transaction under study.
The value of thirty pence is the number given by Spelman and repeated by Burrill, but researchers should be aware that valuation of the mancus in the historical literature has not always been uniform — some sources associate it with a gold denomination, and its relationship to silver pence could vary by period and context. When the value of a stated obligation is material to your research (for instance, when comparing fines across documents or assessing the scale of a grant), cross-referencing with specialized numismatic and diplomatic scholarship is advisable rather than relying solely on legal dictionary sources.
The term is also a useful marker for document dating and provenance. Its appearance in a legal instrument is a strong signal that the document either originates from or deliberately imitates the Anglo-Saxon or early medieval period. Researchers encountering manca in documents of uncertain date should treat it as a paleographic and historical indicator warranting closer scrutiny of the document's authenticity and period.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary legal dictionary source here, and its entry is brief: it identifies manca as a Saxon coin worth thirty pence and cites Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum (under the headword Mancusa) as authority. This is characteristic of how historical legal dictionaries treat archaic monetary terms — they record the denomination and point to the antiquarian source without analysis.
The Webster's 1913 entry for manca merely cross-references mancus, confirming that the two spellings were treated as interchangeable in general reference literature. Neither source attempts to analyze variation in value or usage across different documentary corpora, which reflects the limited numismatic ambition of general legal and language dictionaries of the period.
Researchers should note that Spelman's Glossarium remains the foundational reference for Anglo-Saxon legal and diplomatic terminology; Burrill's deference to it is appropriate. For deeper treatment of the mancus as a monetary and legal unit, numismatic scholarship and diplomatic editions of Anglo-Saxon charters (such as those available through the Electronic Sawyer database of Anglo-Saxon charters) will carry more weight than any general legal dictionary.