Definition
Pergamenum is a Latin legal term meaning parchment — the prepared animal skin used as a writing surface for formal legal instruments, court records, and official documents in medieval and early modern practice. The term appears in old English legal practice primarily in the phrase in pergameno scribi fecit, meaning "caused [it] to be written on parchment," a formula used to attest the physical form of a recorded instrument. It carries no independent substantive legal meaning but functions as a descriptor of the material medium on which a document was executed or enrolled.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Parchment; writing material made from the treated skin of a sheep or goat, or material resembling it.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Parchment; the skin of a sheep or goat, dressed and prepared for writing upon; also, a document written on such material.
The gap between common and legal usage here is minimal in substance but significant in context. In common usage, parchment is simply a material. In old legal practice, the specification that an instrument was written on parchment — pergamenum — was a matter of formal record, because the medium of execution could affect the instrument's authenticity, durability, and enrollment. The word in a legal source signals procedural attestation, not mere description.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering pergamenum in historical legal sources should treat it as a procedural marker rather than a substantive term. Its appearance signals you are reading a record of formal enrollment or attestation of a document's physical execution — common in plea rolls, charter enrollments, and early common law practice records.
The principal trap is assuming the term has independent legal significance. It does not. Pergamenum in a source tells you about the physical record, not the legal transaction itself. Researchers focused on the underlying transaction should look past the term to the instrument it describes.
The phrase in pergameno scribi fecit appears in early English reports as a formulaic attestation. When encountered in Year Books, plea rolls, or early abridgments, it is best understood as boilerplate indicating the clerk's act of engrossing or enrolling the document on parchment — a standard step in formalizing court records and enrolled deeds.
Corpus researchers should note that variant spellings exist: pergamenum, pergameno, and occasionally pergaminum appear across Latin legal manuscripts. Search strategies in historical databases should account for these variants. The term is almost always encountered in the ablative or accusative case (pergameno, pergamenum) rather than the nominative, reflecting its grammatical role in formulaic phrases.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree: pergamenum means parchment, and all anchor the definition to the same formulaic phrase, in pergameno scribi fecit, with reference to 1 Anderson's Reports 54. Black's first and second editions are essentially identical on this point. Burrill's entry is partially corrupted in the available source text — the entry appears to bleed into an unrelated passage on perils of the sea in insurance policy interpretation — but the core definition is consistent with the other sources.
None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on the procedural significance of the term or explain why specification of parchment mattered in practice. They treat it as a simple gloss. This is typical of Latin law glossaries of the period, which prioritized translation over context. Researchers should not expect further guidance from these sources on the term's functional role in old practice.
Jurisdictional Note
Pergamenum is a term of English legal Latin with no meaningful jurisdictional variation. It appears in English and early Anglo-American legal records and has no active use in modern legal practice in any jurisdiction.