Definition
A Latin place-name used in historical English legal records. *Robertinus Pons* translates literally as "Robert's Bridge" and refers to Robertsbridge, a village in Sussex, England. The term appears in formal Latin instruments — charters, deeds, monastic records, and legal proceedings — where English place-names were rendered in their Latinized forms, as was standard practice in medieval and early modern documentary drafting.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *Robertinus Pons* in a Latin legal document should recognize it immediately as a geographic identifier, not a legal term of art. The practical challenge is that Latinized place-names in historical instruments follow no uniform system: some are phonetic approximations, some are literal translations of the English name, and some are classical or ecclesiastical inventions with little surface resemblance to the modern toponym. *Robertinus Pons* falls into the literal-translation category — "Robert's Bridge" rendered as Latin noun phrases — which makes it among the more recoverable forms once the pattern is understood.
The term is most likely to appear in records connected to Robertsbridge Abbey, a Cistercian house founded in the twelfth century in Sussex, which generated substantial documentary activity including charters, grantor lists, boundary descriptions, and ecclesiastical pleadings. Legal instruments touching on lands, rents, or rights in or near the abbey's holdings would naturally carry this Latinized form.
A trap for researchers working from indexes or calendars: English-language calendars of Latin records often modernize or anglicize place-names without flagging the substitution, meaning *Robertinus Pons* in the original may appear simply as "Robertsbridge" in the finding aid. Searching only the modernized form in a Latin document corpus will miss instances of the Latin construction.
The adjacent entries in Burrill — *Rotherbridge* for another Sussex location, *Roffa* for Rochester, *Roisiæ Oppidum* for Royston — confirm that this portion of the dictionary functions as a gazetteer of Latinized English place-names, not a glossary of legal doctrine. Researchers should treat these entries collectively as a reference tool for geographic decoding rather than as definitions of substantive legal concepts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary includes *Robertinus Pons* as part of a short gazetteer series identifying Latinized names for English towns and localities. Burrill provides the identification — Robertsbridge in Sussex — without elaboration, which is appropriate given that the entry's entire function is geographic translation. No other major historical law dictionaries (Jacob, Tomlin, Bouvier) appear to carry this term, reflecting that such place-name glossaries were a particular feature of Burrill's broader approach to Latin legal vocabulary. The entry's value is purely referential: it anchors an unfamiliar Latin phrase to a known English location for the researcher working through a medieval or early modern instrument.
Jurisdictional Note
Relevant exclusively to English legal history. *Robertinus Pons* has no application in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Researchers working in English ecclesiastical records, Chancery proceedings, or property instruments from Sussex should be alert to the form.