Definition
An ancient Saxon unit of dry measure used in England before the Norman Conquest. The precise quantity represented by a mitta is historically uncertain. Authorities differ on whether it equaled a corus, a modius (roughly one bushel), or approximately ten bushels. The term appears almost exclusively in pre-Conquest and early post-Conquest legal and manorial records.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An old English measure of volume, perhaps equal to two bushels.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry found.
The gap between modern popular reference and the historical legal record is telling. Wiktionary's "perhaps two bushels" diverges from the range offered by legal antiquarians, who place the mitta anywhere from one bushel (if equated with modius) to ten bushels. Neither figure should be treated as settled. Researchers encountering mitta in a document should resist defaulting to any fixed conversion.
Why It Matters in Research
The mitta is a trap term for anyone working with pre-Conquest land records, estate surveys, or early manorial documents. The core problem is that the measure was never standardized in surviving sources — Blount, Cowell, and Spelman each preserve different traditions, and none commands authority over the others. A researcher who assigns a fixed bushel equivalent to mitta when interpreting grain renders, tithes, or agricultural obligations in a primary source risks a significant interpretive error.
Two practical cautions: First, do not assume the mitta named in one document equals the mitta named in another. Regional variation in pre-Conquest England was substantial, and local custom governed dry measure more than any centralized standard. Second, later copyists and translators working from Old English or Latin originals sometimes substituted more familiar measure-terms (bushel, quarter) without flagging the substitution. If a translation appears to have smoothed over a measure term, check the original.
The connection to corus and modius is worth pursuing in the Law Mind corpus. Both terms appear in overlapping documentary contexts, and comparison may help narrow interpretation for a specific document even if no universal equivalence can be established.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill draws entirely on the antiquarian tradition — Blount's Nomo-Lexicon, Cowell's Interpreter, and Spelman's Glossarium — and is candid that the quantity "is not known with certainty." This is notable precisely because legal dictionaries of the period frequently offered false precision on archaic measures. Burrill's restraint here reflects the genuine state of the record: the disagreement among Blount, Cowell, and Spelman is not a matter of one authority correcting another but of three independent attempts to reconstruct a measure for which no authoritative contemporary definition survives.
No later English legal dictionary of comparable standing appears to have added materially to the record. The absence of the term from Black's Law Dictionary and from most post-Burrill American references reflects the term's confinement to pre-Conquest and early medieval English documentary contexts, which fell outside the working vocabulary of nineteenth-century American legal practice.
Jurisdictional Note
Mitta is exclusively an English historical term with no operative legal meaning in any modern jurisdiction. It surfaces only in the context of historical English land law, manorial records, and antiquarian legal scholarship.