Definition
Salem, in legal usage, refers to a body of feudal law compiled in 1099 following the First Crusade and the establishment of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The code — more fully identified as the Assizes of Jerusalem — was enacted by an assembly of Latin barons, clergy, and laity convened under Godfrey of Bouillon, the first ruler of the newly conquered city. It constituted the foundational legal framework for the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the broader network of Crusader states in the Levant.
The term "Salem" as a legal designation derives from the ancient and scriptural name for Jerusalem, used in the title or description of this code to identify the seat of the kingdom for which it was promulgated. In legal literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, references to "the Assizes of Salem" or simply "Salem" in feudal law contexts signify this code specifically.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Salem most commonly denotes a place name — the capital of Oregon, the historically notorious Massachusetts city associated with the 1692 witch trials, or the biblical city identified with Jerusalem and ruled by Melchizedek.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Salem appears primarily as a proper noun of biblical and geographical origin, referring to the ancient city of peace — derived from the Hebrew for peace — and identified with Jerusalem.
Editorial note: In ordinary language, Salem calls to mind either American geography or the Salem witch trials. In feudal legal scholarship, it functions as a technical shorthand for a specific medieval law code. A researcher encountering "Salem" in a nineteenth-century legal text or treatise on feudal jurisprudence should not assume a geographical or American legal reference — the term signals the Assizes of Jerusalem and the Crusader legal tradition.
Common Confusion
Salem is sometimes used interchangeably with "Assizes of Jerusalem" in historical legal literature, but the two formulations carry different emphasis. "Assizes of Jerusalem" foregrounds the procedural and statutory character of the compilation; "Salem" foregrounds the seat of the kingdom and was favored in older scholarly shorthand. Researchers should treat both as references to the same body of law. Additionally, the Salem witch trials generated a substantial body of colonial American legal records bearing the Salem name — these are entirely unrelated to the feudal law code and belong to a distinct area of legal history.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering the term Salem in Burrill's Law Dictionary or in contemporaneous feudal law treatises must immediately distinguish this usage from the far more common geographical and colonial American legal contexts. The risk of misattribution is high: search queries for "Salem" in historical legal corpora will surface results from Massachusetts colonial court records, Oregon territorial law, and biblical commentary alongside the Crusader law materials.
The Assizes of Jerusalem are significant to feudal law research because they represent one of the most complete surviving codifications of feudal jurisprudence from the medieval period, and they influenced legal scholarship on the Continent and in England through the work of commentators such as Coke and Blackstone's predecessors. Burrill's citation to Butler's notes on Coke's Littleton (note 77, lib. 3) is a key navigational anchor — researchers tracing feudal tenure, liege homage, or the structure of feudal courts in common law commentary will find that Coke-Littleton annotations frequently invoke the Jerusalem assizes as a comparative source.
The code itself was the subject of sustained attention by Robertson in his History of Charles V (Appendix, note xxv) and by Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (vol. 4). These are the primary scholarly treatments available in the Law Mind corpus. Robertson's characterization — the fragment of which Burrill quotes — situates the Assizes as a document of constitutional as well as feudal significance for the Crusader polity.
Note that the original text of the Assizes was reportedly destroyed when Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187. The versions available to nineteenth-century scholars, and thus to compilers like Burrill, were reconstructions and later redactions, primarily the version associated with John of Ibelin. Researchers should treat historical descriptions of the code's contents with corresponding caution.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary legal dictionary treatment, identifying Salem as the feudal code of 1099 and dating it with precision. Burrill's entry cross-references Butler's notes on Coke's Littleton, Gibbon, and Robertson — a cluster of sources that tells researchers this term lived primarily in the world of comparative feudal scholarship rather than active legal practice. No other major Anglo-American legal dictionary of the period (Black's first edition, Bouvier) appears to carry a dedicated Salem entry, suggesting Burrill's treatment was somewhat specialized.
The omission from later dictionaries is itself informative: by the late nineteenth century, the Assizes of Jerusalem had receded into legal history and comparative jurisprudence, losing whatever practical relevance they may have held for common law commentators tracing feudal tenure doctrine. Researchers using later dictionaries as their primary source will not find this entry and may miss the connection entirely.
Jurisdictional Note
The Assizes of Jerusalem operated within the Crusader states of the Levant and have no binding authority in any modern jurisdiction. Their relevance to Anglo-American legal research is exclusively historical and comparative — primarily as a reference point in feudal law scholarship and in annotations to Coke's Littleton.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Assizes of Jerusalem; Feudal Tenure; Crusader States Legal Systems; Godfrey of Bouillon