Definition
An obsolete Anglo-Saxon unit of account, functioning as a denomination of money rather than a circulating coin in the modern sense. The ora was valued at sixteen pence in most historical records, though some sources place its value at twenty pence sterling. It appears primarily in Domesday Book entries and related medieval English fiscal and property records.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A diminutive of the given name Aurelia; also a surname and an alternative spelling of a place name in South Tyrol, Italy.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A money of account among the Anglo-Saxons, valued in the Domesday Book at twenty pence sterling.
The legal and the common meanings share no functional overlap. A researcher encountering "ora" in a legal or historical document should not associate it with the personal name or place name. The Webster's 1913 entry is itself historically oriented, confirming that by 1913 the term had no living legal or monetary usage and survived only as an antiquarian reference.
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Common Confusion
The discrepancy in valuation — sixteen pence versus twenty pence — is the principal source of confusion in secondary literature. The variation is not an error in the dictionaries; it reflects genuine inconsistency in Domesday Book itself, where the ora's value fluctuated by region and context. Researchers should not assume a single fixed rate and should consult the specific entry in question rather than relying on a universal conversion.
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Why It Matters in Research
The ora is almost exclusively a term of Domesday scholarship and early Anglo-Saxon property law. Researchers working with pre-Conquest and immediately post-Conquest English records — land grants, fiscal surveys, manorial assessments — will encounter it as a unit for expressing rents, renders, or valuations. Its significance is interpretive rather than transactional: understanding what an ora represents affects how a researcher reads the economic and proprietary relationships recorded in a document.
The valuation inconsistency noted above is a genuine research trap. Domesday Book uses the ora differently in different circuits, and later medieval documents sometimes carry forward the term with local customary values that diverge from either figure cited in the standard dictionaries. Any translation of an ora-denominated obligation into modern or comparative value requires attention to the specific geographic and temporal context of the source.
The term will not appear in post-medieval legal sources in any operative sense. If encountered in a later document, it is either a deliberate archaism, a quotation from an earlier source, or a transcription error.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries are in agreement on the core definition: an Anglo-Saxon coin or money of account valued at sixteen pence, with a noted alternative of twenty pence. Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence reproduce substantially the same formulation. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry adds a fragment referencing Domesday Book and related records as the evidentiary context, consistent with the term's primary habitat in the historical corpus.
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not provide a substantive entry for "ora" as a discrete term; the passage attributed to it in the source material appears to be extraneous text from a neighboring entry, containing Latin maxims unrelated to the ora. This is a reminder that pagination and proximity in historical dictionaries can introduce noise into digitized extracts.
None of the source dictionaries engage with the valuation discrepancy, nor do they flag regional variation within Domesday Book. For a term with so narrow a range of application, this is a significant omission. Researchers should treat the dictionary entries as an introduction to the term, not as a reliable guide to its value in any particular document.
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Jurisdictional Note
Relevant only to English legal and fiscal history, specifically the period surrounding the Norman Conquest and the Domesday survey of 1086. No application to any modern jurisdiction.
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