Definition
An obsolete unit of measure for both liquid and dry commodities, appearing in old English records and legal instruments. The term derived from the Latin sextarius and was used to express quantities of goods in manorial accounts, conveyances, and commercial transactions. Its precise value was variable and contested even among historical authorities: Spelman equated it with a quarter or seam; Cowell placed it at roughly a pint and a half; Fleta specified that the sexterium should contain four gallons. This wide divergence reflects both regional variation in practice and the general instability of pre-standardized English weights and measures.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A synonym of sextarius, the ancient Roman unit of volume; also an Anglo-Saxon unit of liquid measure chiefly used for wine and cider.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An ancient Roman liquid and dry measure, approximately equal to an English pint.
The common usage ties the term firmly to Roman and early Anglo-Saxon measurement, implying a roughly pint-sized quantity. The legal usage is broader and less precise — appearing in medieval English records where the term had already drifted from its Roman origins and could denote anything from a pint and a half to four gallons depending on locality, commodity, and authority. A researcher who imports the Roman pint equivalence into a reading of an English manorial record risks significant misinterpretation.
Why It Matters in Research
SEXTARY is an archival and paleographic problem as much as a legal one. It appears most often in manorial records, inquisitions, tithes, and accounts of provisioning — contexts where the precise quantity being described has direct legal or economic consequence (rent obligations, tithe assessments, customs duties). The instability of the term's meaning across sources means that identifying the commodity, the date, and the locality is essential before applying any fixed conversion. The disagreement among Spelman, Cowell, and Fleta is not a curiosity — it is the central research problem.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should be alert to the fact that both editions of Black's collapse the definition to a brief, unqualified statement citing only Spelman, omitting the Cowell and Fleta divergences entirely. Burrill is the more useful source here, as it explicitly flags the contradictions among authorities. If you encounter SEXTARY in a primary source and the quantity matters, Burrill's entry is the starting point, not Black's.
The term is also a signal: its presence in a document is a reliable indicator that the instrument is pre-modern and likely pre-Elizabethan. Standard weights and measures legislation in England progressively displaced archaic local measures, and SEXTARY effectively disappears from legal instruments by the early modern period. Seeing it in a document helps date the source or identify a formulaic copying of older language.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the essential character of the term: an old measure of liquids and dry goods, traced through Spelman. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) are nearly identical and rely exclusively on Spelman's authority, offering no indication of the definitional controversy.
Burrill is distinctly more valuable. It presents three competing authorities — Spelman (a quarter or seam; also a quart), Cowell (about a pint and a half), and Fleta (four gallons) — without forcing a reconciliation. This honest acknowledgment of disagreement is the appropriate treatment for a term whose value was never fixed. Burrill's entry implicitly warns the reader that no single conversion factor is safe to apply without independent verification from context.
What all three historical dictionaries omit: any guidance on how to resolve the ambiguity in practice, any reference to commodity-specific or regional conventions, and any discussion of the term's appearance in specific classes of records. For a term whose legal relevance is almost entirely archival, this is a significant gap.
Jurisdictional Note
SEXTARY is effectively an English legal antiquity with no meaningful modern jurisdictional footprint. Its legal relevance is confined to the interpretation of historical English documents, primarily those predating the early modern standardization of weights and measures. It does not appear as a live legal term in any contemporary common law jurisdiction.