Definition
A reve mote was a court held by the reve (also spelled reeve or shire reeve) under Anglo-Saxon law. The term is a compound of the Old English office title *reve* and *mote*, meaning an assembly or meeting — giving a literal sense of "the reeve's court." The reve mote functioned as a local judicial assembly presided over by the chief administrative officer of a given territorial unit, whether a township, hundred, or shire. In the context of the shire reeve — the direct ancestor of the modern sheriff — the reve mote corresponds to an early form of the court that would later develop into the sheriff's tourn and, ultimately, into broader common law court structures.
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Common Confusion
REVE MOTE should not be conflated with the SHIRE MOOT (or shire gemot), which was a county-level assembly of broader membership and jurisdiction. The reve mote was specifically the court presided over by the reeve as an officer, while the shire moot was a more general assembly of the county. The distinction matters in historical research: sources sometimes use the terms loosely, and the jurisdictional lines between Anglo-Saxon local courts were not always sharply drawn in practice.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical and antiquarian legal sources dealing with Anglo-Saxon and early English law. Researchers will rarely encounter reve mote outside of scholarship on pre-Conquest legal institutions. Its principal research value is as a link in the chain connecting Anglo-Saxon local administration to the later development of the sheriff's court, the tourn, the hundred court, and eventually the common law county court.
Several traps await the unwary researcher. First, spelling is unstable across sources: *reve mote*, *reeve mote*, and *reevement* all appear in early texts, and mote itself is sometimes rendered *moot*, *mot*, or *gemot*. Searches confined to one spelling will miss cognate material. Second, the office of the *reve* itself had multiple grades — there were village reeves, port reeves, and shire reeves — and the jurisdiction and character of the court varied accordingly. A reve mote presided over by a township reeve was a far more limited body than one held by a shire reeve. Primary sources do not always specify which level is meant. Third, the corpus of Anglo-Saxon legal materials is largely in Latin or Old English, and English-language secondary sources from the nineteenth century (the primary era of this scholarship) sometimes impose anachronistic common law frameworks onto pre-Conquest institutions. Treat institutional continuity claims with appropriate skepticism.
For Law Mind corpus researchers, reve mote connects most directly to materials on the historical development of English local government, the office of the sheriff, and the evolution of inferior courts. The term serves as a retrieval anchor for a cluster of related Anglo-Saxon judicial terms rather than as a standalone research destination.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in close agreement: each defines reve mote as the court of the reve, reeve, or shire reeve under Saxon law, and all three cite the same primary authority — the first volume of Reeves' *History of English Law* at page 6. Black's first and second editions are nearly identical, with only minor spelling variation in "reevée" in the second edition. Burrill accurately cites the source as "Reeves' Hist. Eng. Law" rather than simply "Reeve," which is the more complete bibliographic form.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the range of the term's application across different grades of the reeve office, the relationship between the reve mote and other contemporaneous Anglo-Saxon assemblies, or the institutional transition from the reve mote to later Norman and common law court forms. The entries are definitional minimums — useful as starting points but not as comprehensive analyses. Researchers should proceed directly to Reeves and to later Anglo-Saxon legal historians such as Maitland and Stubbs for substantive treatment.
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Jurisdictional Note
Reve mote is a purely historical English institution with no direct counterpart in American law or modern English law. It is relevant only to scholarship on pre-Conquest English legal history and comparative studies of early medieval legal institutions.
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