Definition
An archaic Welsh legal term denoting the body of the lordship of Cardiff (also rendered Cerdiff or Cærdiff) in South Wales, as distinguished from its outlying members or dependent territories. The shereffe comprised the core territorial unit of the Cardiff lordship — the principal or central portion — while the "members" referred to subordinate or peripheral lands attached to but legally distinct from that core. The term has no modern operative legal meaning and appears exclusively in historical sources concerning the Marcher lordships of medieval Wales.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear only in highly specialized historical research into the Welsh Marcher lordships, medieval land tenure in Wales, or parliamentary records from the reign of Edward III. Researchers encountering "shereffe" in archival materials should understand it as a term of art specific to Cardiff's feudal territorial organization — not a generic administrative title and not related to the English office of sheriff despite superficial phonetic similarity.
The critical navigational point: the spelling varies across the source dictionaries (Cardiff, Cerdiff, Cærdiff), and the cited authority — Powell's History of Wales — uses its own rendering. Researchers working from manuscript or printed Welsh sources should search variant spellings. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry adds the parliamentary reference (50 Edw. III), which provides a datable anchor for legal historians; this parliamentary citation does not appear in either edition of Black's and is the most useful research lead in the source material.
The distinction between the shereffe and its "members" was a meaningful legal boundary in the context of Marcher law, where the extent of a lord's jurisdiction and the dues owed to him could turn on whether specific lands fell within the core lordship or were classified as outlying members. Researchers examining disputes over tenure, service obligations, or jurisdictional reach in the Cardiff lordship would need to establish which category particular lands belonged to.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in substantive agreement: the shereffe is the body of the Cardiff lordship excluding its members. The variation among entries is orthographic rather than substantive — Cardiff, Cerdiff, and Cærdiff are renderings of the same place. All three cite Powell's History of Wales as the authoritative source, reflecting that this term was not a creature of English common law but of Welsh historical record, and that the dictionaries are themselves relying on a single antiquarian authority rather than a body of case law or statute.
Rapalje & Lawrence provides the most legally actionable entry by appending the parliamentary reference (Parl. 50 Edw. III — the Parliament of the 50th year of Edward III's reign), which grounds the term in a datable primary source. Neither edition of Black's includes this reference, meaning researchers relying solely on Black's would miss the direct parliamentary connection.
No source attempts a broader doctrinal analysis, and none connects the term to the general law of the Marches or to comparable territorial arrangements in other lordships. The historical dictionaries treat this as a definitional record of a specific local term, nothing more.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the historical Marcher lordship of Cardiff in South Wales. It has no application in English common law jurisdictions and no modern legal relevance in any jurisdiction. Research use is confined to medieval Welsh legal history and the records of the Welsh Marches.