Definition
A redditarium is a historical document consisting of a systematic record of rents owed to a lord or landowner — that is, a rental or rent-roll. The term appears in old English legal records and manorial administration, where it functioned as the official register in which tenants' names, landholdings, and corresponding rent obligations were catalogued. A redditarium was not a receipt or proof of payment but rather a prospective or standing record of what rents were due, from whom, and on what terms.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially a paleographic and archival term rather than a live legal doctrine. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in transcriptions or analyses of medieval and early modern English manorial records, estate surveys, and ecclesiastical rentals. Its practical importance lies in source identification: knowing that a document described as a redditarium is a rent-roll allows a researcher to assess its evidentiary weight in disputes over historical land tenure, copyhold rights, customary rents, or the extent of a manor.
The term is closely connected to cognate instruments — the rental proper, the terrier, and the extent — and researchers should be careful not to conflate these functionally similar but technically distinct records. A redditarium specifically emphasizes the rent component, while a terrier focuses on the physical description of lands and a general extent encompasses both values and services. When working in corpus materials treating manorial law, customary tenure, or copyhold, the redditarium may appear as evidence of the existence and terms of a tenure arrangement, particularly in disputes where no formal deed existed and the rent-roll served as proof of custom.
Researchers using Law Mind materials covering feudal tenure, manorial courts, or the history of landlord-tenant relations should flag this term as a gateway to primary source evidence. Absence of a redditarium for a given manor does not prove absence of rental obligation — such records were frequently lost, damaged, or never formally compiled for smaller holdings.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary consulted here provide identical, minimal entries: "In old records. A rental, or rent-roll. Cowell." The cross-reference to Cowell points to John Cowell's *The Interpreter* (1607), a glossary of legal and antiquarian terms that was a foundational reference for early modern common lawyers encountering archaic Latin terms in old records. Black's adds no further elaboration between its first and second editions, and neither edition situates the term within the broader framework of manorial administration or feudal land law. Researchers should treat these entries as identification aids only — they confirm what a redditarium is called but say nothing about how such documents were used in litigation or conveyancing practice. For substantive treatment of rent-rolls as legal evidence, researchers must look beyond dictionary sources to works on manorial history and treatises on copyhold and customary tenure.
---
Jurisdictional Note
This is a term of English legal history with no meaningful application in American law. Researchers working in jurisdictions derived from English common law may encounter it in historical chains of title or academic treatments of feudal tenure, but it has no operational significance in any current Anglo-American legal system.
---