Definition
A Latin designation for Kingston-upon-Hull, the port city and county in Yorkshire, England. The term is a Latinized place-name used in formal legal instruments, royal charters, and official records during the medieval and early modern periods when Latin was the standard language of English legal documentation. "Regiodunum" renders the "King's town" element of the English name, while "Hullinum" derives from the River Hull on which the city stands.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern Latin legal instruments — royal grants, patent rolls, borough charters, admiralty records, and similar documents — where the English place-name Kingston-upon-Hull would not appear. A researcher working through Latin chancery records, port customs documentation, or municipal charters relating to the city of Hull will encounter this form and must recognize it as referring to the same jurisdiction known in modern sources as Kingston-upon-Hull or simply Hull. Failure to identify the equivalence could cause a researcher to overlook directly relevant materials.
The term is also a reminder of a broader navigational challenge in English legal history: nearly every significant English town had one or more Latinized forms used in formal records, and those forms do not always map intuitively to the modern English name. Hull's prominence as a major North Sea trading port means it appears frequently in medieval admiralty, customs, and mercantile records, many of which will use this Latin designation rather than any English equivalent.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on topics touching Yorkshire land law, English port regulation, admiralty jurisdiction, or the history of borough incorporation should note that records referencing Regiodunum Hullinum may be directly relevant to questions that modern indexes catalog under Hull, Kingston-upon-Hull, or the East Riding of Yorkshire.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry in its most compressed form: "Kingston-upon-Hull in Yorkshire." This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Latin place-names and geographical terms — the entry functions as a pure equivalence gloss, giving the researcher the modern English identification without elaboration. No historical legal dictionary in the standard shelf set expands meaningfully on this term beyond the place identification, which is appropriate: the term carries no independent legal doctrine and requires only correct identification to be useful. Researchers should not expect other historical dictionaries to supply additional content; the term is a lexical artifact of Latin documentary practice, not a legal concept with developed meaning.