Definition
In old English law, saltus had two distinct uses within forest and land law:
1. A high, dense wood or forest; used interchangeably with boscus in some contexts to describe a substantial wooded area forming part of a lord's estate or royal forest.
2. A lawn, glade, or open clearing within a park or forest — that is, an area of unwooded or lightly wooded ground enclosed within a larger forested tract, typically reserved for grazing or the maintenance of deer.
The term appears primarily in medieval Latin legal texts and documents concerning forest rights, park boundaries, and the classification of land. Its significance lies chiefly in the precise description of landholding: saltus, silva, and boscus were not strictly synonymous, and their distinctions could bear on what rights a tenant, lord, or the Crown held over particular land.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A break of continuity; a leap from premises to conclusion; in mathematics, the difference between the right and left limits of a function at a given point.
Historical Latin meaning: From salio — a leaping, leap, spring, or bound (classical Latin). The physical sense of a jump or spring is the root meaning.
The gap between legal and common meaning here is substantial and worth flagging. The English legal term saltus descends from the same Latin root but migrated entirely away from the sense of motion or leaping. In Old English forest law, it settled into a specialized sense describing a type of terrain — either dense woodland or open glades within a park. A researcher encountering the word in a medieval charter or forest survey should not read it as a leap or logical gap, but as a descriptor of land character. The mathematical and logical senses of saltus have no bearing on legal documents.
Why It Matters in Research
Saltus is a term confined almost entirely to medieval and early modern English forest and land law. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in post-Tudor legal texts, and it does not appear in modern statutory or common law. Its significance is diagnostic: when saltus appears in a charter, inquisition, extent, or forest proceeding, it signals that the document is dealing with the physical classification of wooded or park land, which in turn implicates questions of rights of common, hunting privileges, timber rights, and the boundaries of royal forest jurisdiction.
The key research trap is conflation. Medieval Latin land documents use a cluster of related terms — boscus, silva, nemus, foresta, parcus, and saltus — which overlap but are not identical. Burrill himself notes that saltus is equated with boscus in some sources (citing Cowell), but also preserves a distinct gloss of "lawn in a park or forest" from Fortescue. These two senses can coexist in the same document referring to different features of the same tract. Misreading saltus as merely synonymous with boscus risks flattening a distinction that may have legal consequences in the original context.
Researchers working on forest law, rights of chase, or manorial extents should cross-reference this term against the forest law entries in the Law Mind Encyclopedia and against primary sources such as the Forest Charters and medieval inquisitions post mortem, where land classification terms carry operative legal weight.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary authority here, and the entry is brief. He draws on two sources for the two senses: Cowell's Interpreter (equating saltus with boscus as a high thick wood) and Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Angliae, chapter 29, for the sense of a lawn within a park or forest. Neither sense is contradicted by the classical Latin, which supports a physical, terrain-based reading — the "leap" of open ground within forest cover, perhaps, is not an implausible etymological bridge, though legal dictionaries do not pursue it.
No other major historical law dictionaries in this corpus provide an independent entry for saltus. The term does not appear in Bouvier, Black (early editions), or Tomlin as a standalone entry, reflecting its narrowness as a term of art. Cowell's Interpreter, referenced by Burrill, is the deeper primary source for researchers wanting fuller treatment.
Burrill's entry, though short, is reliable as far as it goes. What it does not provide is any treatment of how courts or commissions actually applied the distinction between the two senses, or how saltus interacted with forest eyre proceedings. That gap is significant for anyone doing primary source research on forest law disputes.
Jurisdictional Note
Saltus as a legal term is specific to English law and its medieval Latin documentary tradition. It does not appear as a term of art in Scots law, civil law, or American law. Researchers in Welsh, Irish, or colonial land records should not expect to find it, though analogous Latin land terms appear in those traditions under different vocabulary.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Forest Law
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Rights
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Land Tenure (Medieval)