Definition
In old English legal records, a saltatorium was a physical enclosure or contrivance associated with the management of wild animals on forest or chase land. The term carried two related but distinct usages in historical practice:
1. A deer-leap: an opening or gap in the boundary of a forest or park, constructed so that deer and other wild animals could enter from outside but could not easily exit. The design exploited the animal's natural tendency to jump inward toward cover while preventing escape outward.
2. An engine or trap for taking wild animals: a mechanical contrivance used in the capture of game, distinct from but related to the structural deer-leap.
Both usages arise exclusively in the context of medieval English forest law and manorial record-keeping. The term does not appear in modern legal usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English forest law, manorial records, or forest eyre proceedings will encounter saltatorium in pleadings, perambulations, and surveys describing the physical infrastructure of forests, chases, parks, and warrens. The term is highly localized to this body of sources and should be understood as part of a technical vocabulary governing the rights and obligations attached to enclosed hunting land.
The Burrill citation to Plea Rolls at Chester (31 Edw. III) signals that the term appears in records of the palatinate jurisdiction of Cheshire, which maintained distinct forest administration. Researchers consulting Chester eyre and palatinate records should be alert to the term appearing in disputes over forest boundaries, encroachments, and the rights of adjacent landowners whose deer might be drawn in through such a gap.
The two meanings — structural gap and mechanical trap — could bear on different legal questions. A deer-leap was a feature of boundary design that implicated questions of ownership, responsibility for straying animals, and rights of free warren. A trap or engine raised questions of license, poaching, and liability under forest law. Sources do not always distinguish cleanly between these meanings, and context must guide interpretation.
Spelman and Cowell, cited by Burrill, are the primary bridge sources for this term and should be consulted directly for any research requiring more than a passing identification of the word. Neither Spelman's Glossarium nor Cowell's Interpreter was written as a legal dictionary in the modern sense; both are glossaries of obsolete terms drawn from records, and their entries for saltatorium reflect record usage rather than doctrinal definition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's is the only standard American or English law dictionary of the nineteenth century to carry this term, and his entry is itself derivative of Cowell and Spelman. This chain of authority — record usage glossed by Cowell and Spelman, then passed to Burrill — is typical for highly archaic Latin terms that survived only in pleading transcriptions and antiquarian glossaries.
Cowell's Interpreter (various editions, 17th century) and Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum are the foundational sources. Both treat the term as belonging to old records and neither attempts to give it ongoing legal significance. There is no meaningful divergence between the two sources; they describe the same phenomenon from slightly different angles (structural vs. mechanical), which accounts for the dual definition Burrill records.
No major English law dictionary of the period — not Jacob, not Tomlin, not Bouvier in the American tradition — carries the term. Its absence from those works confirms that saltatorium had no living legal significance by the time those dictionaries were compiled. It is, in practical terms, a dead term preserved in record transcription.
Jurisdictional Note
The term appears in the context of English medieval forest law and is specific to that system. Palatinate records, particularly those of Chester, are one likely locus. There is no analogous term or institution in American law.