Definition
A salina is an old English law term for a salt-pit, salt works, or place where salt is made or processed. The term appears in historical property law contexts, particularly in descriptions of real property capable of being held as a tenement or subject to conveyance. It refers to a fixed location — whether a pit, enclosed pond, or working facility — associated with the extraction or production of salt.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A salt marsh, or salt pond, enclosed from the sea.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A salt marsh, or salt pond, inclosed from the sea; salt works.
The common usage emphasizes the natural or semi-natural geographic feature — a body of saltwater enclosed from the sea. The legal usage in old English law is narrower and more functional: a salina is specifically a site or structure for producing salt, not merely any salt marsh. A researcher should not assume that every geographic salina constitutes a legally cognizable salina in the property law sense; the legal term centers on productive use and defined location, not on the physical character of the water body.
Common Confusion
Burrill notes that in Coke on Littleton the word appears printed as saliva rather than salina — an obvious typographical or scribal error in the source text. Researchers consulting early editions of Coke on Littleton should be aware that the word saliva at folio 4b is a corruption of salina and should not be read according to its ordinary Latin meaning (saliva, meaning spittle). This is a well-documented textual artifact, not a distinct legal term.
Why It Matters in Research
Salina appears almost exclusively in historical English property law materials, particularly in surveys, grants, and conveyances of real property where salt works or salt-producing facilities were enumerated as distinct tenements. Researchers working with medieval or early modern English land records, royal grants, or coastal property instruments should recognize salina as a recognized category of productive real property, analogous to a mill or fishery in its treatment as a self-contained economic unit attached to land.
The Coke on Littleton printing error (saliva for salina) is a genuine research trap. Anyone searching Coke's text for the term salina may fail to locate it without knowing the erroneous form under which it appears in some editions. Cross-referencing Burrill or Cowell is advisable when the Coke passage seems garbled.
The term has essentially no modern legal application in common law jurisdictions and will not appear in contemporary statutory or case law research. Its utility is confined to historical document interpretation, particularly for English legal records predating the eighteenth century. American researchers may encounter salina in early land grant documents in territories with Spanish or English colonial histories, but the term there typically functions as a geographic descriptor rather than a term of art with the precise legal content it carried in old English law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the authoritative entry for this term in the historical legal dictionary tradition, drawing directly on Cowell's Interpreter — itself a foundational glossary of old English legal terms — for the core definition of salt-pit or place where salt is made. Burrill adds the critical textual note about the Coke on Littleton misprint, which is the most practically useful piece of information the historical dictionaries contribute.
Webster's 1913 and the common usage sources describe the term from a geographic rather than legal standpoint, emphasizing the natural landscape feature. Neither common usage source engages with the property law dimension. Burrill is therefore the primary authority for the legal meaning, and Cowell is the underlying source Burrill relies upon. Researchers seeking deeper treatment should consult Cowell directly.
No historical legal dictionary reviewed provides extended analysis of salina as a distinct category of property tenure or conveyance; the entries are uniformly brief glosses. The significance of the term lies in its identification and correct decoding within primary sources, not in any developed body of doctrine surrounding it.
Jurisdictional Note
Salina as a legal term of art is specific to old English law. It does not appear as a term of art in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions, though the word may appear in those jurisdictions' historical documents as a geographic or descriptive term. Researchers working with Spanish colonial land records in the American Southwest may encounter the cognate Spanish term salina, which functions as a geographic label for salt flats or salt lakes and carries no specific legal loading from English property law.