Definition
Latin. In old English law, a pack of hounds. The term appears in medieval legal records and forest law contexts to denote a group of hunting dogs kept together as a unit. The phrase is derived from the Latin *muta*, meaning a pack or kennel, and *canum*, the genitive plural of *canis* (dog).
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *muta canum* will find it almost exclusively in records touching on forest law, manorial rights, and the privileges associated with the royal chase. Medieval English law developed an elaborate regulatory framework governing who could keep hounds, in what numbers, and for what purposes — restrictions bound up with forest law, the assize of the forest, and the rights of free warren. The term signals a legal rather than merely domestic context: the keeping of a *muta canum* was itself a privilege, and unlicensed possession could constitute a forest offense.
The Burrill entry is minimal and points researchers toward Spelman's *Glossarium* as the principal historical source for this term. Spelman's *Glossarium Archaiologicum* remains an essential reference for archaic Latin terms drawn from English legal records, and researchers working in forest law, pipe rolls, or manorial court records should treat it as the first stop after encountering unfamiliar Latin phrases of this type.
The term is unlikely to appear in case reporters in any modern sense. Its natural habitat is the plea rolls, forest eyre records, and cartularies of the medieval period. Researchers who encounter it in transcribed or translated primary sources should read it as a technical descriptor of property or privilege rather than as a term of art carrying doctrinal weight in a contemporary legal sense.
Do not conflate this term with the incidental appearance of *muta* in other Latin legal phrases. Burrill's entry also contains an apparent editorial bleed-through — the surrounding text references *murdravit* and Blackstone's *Commentaries* Book III — which is a formatting artifact of the source dictionary, not part of the definition of *muta canum*.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides only a brief entry: "A pack of hounds," with a citation to Spelman. The entry is compressed, offering no doctrinal context. The reference to Spelman's *Glossarium Archaiologicum* is the operative lead for any deeper research; that work remains the standard scholarly authority on archaic Latin terms in English legal records and supplies the fuller lexical and historical grounding that Burrill does not attempt.
No entry for *muta canum* appears in standard modern legal dictionaries, which reflects the term's obsolescence outside of historical legal scholarship. The term belongs to the vocabulary of medieval forest law, a field that has largely passed out of general legal practice and into legal history. Researchers should not expect to find the term treated in Bouvier, Black's, or other dictionaries oriented toward modern practice.
The apparent inclusion of unrelated material (*murdravit*; Blackstone III, 321) in the Burrill source entry appears to be a typographical or pagination artifact of the original dictionary's layout and should be disregarded as part of this definition.
Jurisdictional Note
Exclusively a term of historical English law with no direct counterpart in American legal doctrine. It may surface in scholarship on colonial charters or early American land grants that replicated English manorial or forest privileges, but no living American legal usage is known.