Definition
In old English law, pila referred to one side of a coin — specifically, the side bearing the impression of a church or other structure built on piles (stilts or posts). The term was the legal and technical designation for what common parlance might call the "reverse" or "tails" side of medieval English coinage, distinguished from the "cross" side bearing the sovereign's image. Its significance arose in legal contexts involving coinage, counterfeiting, and monetary regulation, where precise identification of a coin's faces carried formal weight.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A mortar (a vessel used for grinding).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry directly corresponding to this legal sense; the word "pile" in 1913 usage carried meanings of a heap, a stake or post, or a large building — all distant from the coining context.
The legal meaning of pila is entirely disconnected from its ordinary English senses. A researcher encountering pila in a legal text should not import any common meaning; the term is a narrow technical label from medieval English monetary law.
Why It Matters in Research
Pila is a term that appears almost exclusively in very old English legal sources and treatises on coinage law. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should be alert to several points:
First, the term surfaces in Fleta (lib. 1, c. 39), a late thirteenth-century English legal treatise, which is the anchor citation for all four source dictionaries. Any corpus search touching medieval monetary offenses, coinage regulation, or the law of the mint will potentially surface this term.
Second, pila has no modern legal counterpart. It did not survive into modern common law usage as an operative term. Encountering it in a source signals that the source is either pre-modern or is directly quoting or glossing a pre-modern authority.
Third, because the term describes the side of a coin bearing a structural impression, it could appear in contexts involving coin testing, assaying, or disputes about the authenticity or denomination of currency — areas where courts and legal officers needed precise vocabulary for coin surfaces.
Fourth, researchers should not assume a clean equivalence between pila and any modern numismatic terminology such as "obverse" or "reverse." The distinction tracked by pila was specific to the iconographic conventions of medieval English coinage, not a universal description of coin geometry.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier — agree entirely on the definition, and all trace the term to the same source: Fleta, lib. 1, c. 39. There is no meaningful divergence among them.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is context about how the term functioned in actual legal proceedings or how courts applied the distinction between the pila side and the cross side of a coin. The entries are purely glossary-level: they define the word, cite Fleta, and move on. This reflects the reality that pila was already an archaism by the time Black's was compiled; it warranted inclusion as a historical reference, not as a working term of contemporary practice.
The reference to a church "built on piles" is the etymological key the dictionaries preserve: the coin's impression depicted a structure raised on wooden or stone posts, and the side bearing that impression took its name from it. Bouvier and Rapalje & Lawrence reproduce this explanation word for word, suggesting a shared source tradition tracing back through earlier English legal glossaries.
Jurisdictional Note
Pila is a term of old English law with no counterpart in American, Scottish, or continental legal traditions. It does not appear in equity practice or colonial American legal materials. Research use is confined to English common law sources, primarily medieval.