Definition
An obsolete English tribunal, the revemote (also rendered reve-mote or reevemote) was the court of the reve, reeve, or shire-reeve — the local administrative and judicial officer of early medieval England. The court functioned as a local assembly for the governance of a district, handling matters of administration, dispute resolution, and the enforcement of customary obligations within the reve's jurisdiction. The term belongs to the family of Anglo-Saxon folk-moots, the periodic communal assemblies that formed the foundational layer of pre-Conquest English judicial organization.
Common Confusion
The revemote is easily conflated with other early English moots — particularly the folkmoot, the burghmote, and the hundred court — because these assemblies overlapped in function and historical treatment. The key distinction is that the revemote was specifically the court presided over by the reeve as an officer of the lord or the crown, not a purely communal gathering. The shire-reeve (the predecessor of the sheriff) presided over a version of this court that prefigured the later county court. Researchers should not treat all early English moots as interchangeable; the presiding officer and jurisdictional unit distinguish them.
Why It Matters in Research
The revemote is a term of almost purely historical and antiquarian significance. It will not appear in modern case law, statutory texts, or contemporary legal writing. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in:
— Histories of English law treating the pre-Conquest period, where it appears as part of the institutional landscape alongside the hundred court, the folkmoot, and the witenagemot.
— Treatises on the origins of the sheriff's office, since the shire-reeve's court is a direct ancestor of later county administration.
— Primary source materials or commentaries written before the 19th century, where spelling is inconsistent (reve-mote, reevemote, revemoot).
The principal research trap is terminological instability. Anglo-Saxon and early Norman sources did not use fixed legal vocabulary, and later historians assigned these institutional names retrospectively. A source that uses "revemote" is likely drawing on Reeves or a similar 18th or 19th-century historian of English law rather than an original medieval document. Treat the term as a category imposed by legal historians, not a precisely defined institution with a stable historical record.
For corpus researchers, the revemote sits at the entry point of English court history. Tracing the lineage of the sheriff's jurisdiction, the county court, or the development of local governance under the crown will bring researchers through this institution. It connects forward to the hundred court and the shire court, and backward to the general folk-assembly traditions of Germanic customary law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje and Lawrence define the revemote concisely as "the court of the reve, reeve, or shire-reeve," citing Reeves's History of English Law. This is the standard 19th-century treatment. The entry does no more than identify the institutional type and locate the presiding officer; it does not describe procedure, jurisdiction, or the nature of disputes handled.
The brevity of the Rapalje and Lawrence entry reflects the term's status in 19th-century legal dictionaries: useful for identification, not for substantive legal analysis. Reeves's History of English Law remains the foundational secondary source for the institutional context. Modern historians of Anglo-Saxon law, including Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, provide richer treatment of the moot system generally, though they do not always use the term "revemote" specifically.
No significant disagreement exists among historical dictionaries on the core identification of this term. The variation is one of depth, not substance.
Jurisdictional Note
The revemote is a specifically English institution of the pre-Conquest and early post-Conquest period. It has no counterpart in Scots law, Irish law, or any American legal tradition. Research relevance is confined to English legal history.