Definition
A Latin place-name used in historical legal and geographical texts to designate St. David's Head, a promontory on the westernmost point of Pembrokeshire, Wales. The term appears in Latin records and documents where geographic reference to this headland was required, particularly in descriptions of maritime boundaries, territorial limits, and ecclesiastical or royal grants touching the Welsh coastline.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in Latin legal instruments, ecclesiastical records, and administrative documents predating widespread use of vernacular Welsh or English place-names in official writing. Its significance is geographic and locational rather than doctrinal: the term functions as a coordinate, not a legal concept.
The principal research trap is failing to recognize the term at all. A researcher working through medieval charters, admiralty records, or ecclesiastical grants relating to Wales may encounter OCTOPITARUM PROMONTORIUM without any adjacent gloss or translation, particularly in pre-modern Latin texts where place-names were routinely Latinized. Misreading or skipping the term can cause a researcher to mislocate a boundary, misidentify the subject matter of a grant, or fail to connect a document to its Welsh geographic context.
Corpus connections: Documents referencing this promontory may intersect with records relating to the Diocese of St. David's, the Lordship of Pembroke, maritime jurisdiction in the Irish Sea, and Crown grants or charters touching the southwestern Welsh coast. Researchers working on ecclesiastical boundaries should note that St. David's Head lies within what was historically a significant area of Welsh church authority.
Because the term names a fixed geographic feature rather than a legal doctrine, it does not evolve in meaning across time — but the administrative and legal frameworks governing the territory it describes changed substantially across medieval, Tudor, and later periods. Context matters: the same place-name could appear in an episcopal boundary description, a fishing rights grant, a maritime chart with legal force, or a Crown surveying document, each carrying different legal implications.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical legal dictionary entry for this term, offering the identification: St. David's Head in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The entry is brief by design — this is a proper noun designating a geographical landmark, not a term of art requiring doctrinal elaboration.
Burrill's inclusion of the term reflects the practical function of a mid-nineteenth century law dictionary: to assist practitioners and scholars encountering obscure Latin phrases in older instruments without immediate recourse to specialized geographical or antiquarian references. The entry performs that function adequately. No other major historical legal dictionaries in the standard shelf — Jacob, Tomlin, Bouvier, Black — appear to have carried this entry, which is consistent with its narrow and specialized utility.
What historical sources do not supply is any discussion of the legal contexts in which the term appeared, the categories of documents in which it was most commonly used, or its relationship to adjacent Latin place-names for the Welsh coastline. Researchers needing that context must turn to antiquarian and historical geographical sources beyond the legal dictionary shelf.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to Wales, and more narrowly to Pembrokeshire. It has no application outside the geographic region it names. Any legal document referencing OCTOPITARUM PROMONTORIUM concerns territory on or near the southwestern coast of Wales.