Definition
The period during which a person holds the office of sheriff; the term of a sheriff's tenure. Sheriffalty refers not to the office itself as an institution, but to the duration of a particular individual's incumbency — the span of time a given person serves as sheriff.
The term is occasionally used more loosely to mean the office or jurisdiction of a sheriff generally, but its primary legal sense is temporal: it marks the beginning and end of a specific sheriff's service.
Common Language
Wiktionary: "The office or jurisdiction of a sheriff."
The common usage broadens sheriffalty to encompass the office and its geographic jurisdiction, treating it as roughly synonymous with shrievalty. The legal dictionaries are more precise: sheriffalty denotes the term or duration of service, not the office as a permanent institution or the territorial bounds of the sheriff's authority. A researcher using the term in a historical legal document should read it as a temporal marker — when a person was sheriff — rather than a description of the sheriff's powers or district.
Common Confusion
Sheriffalty is frequently interchangeable with shrievalty in historical sources, and the two terms are often treated as synonyms. The distinction, where one exists, is subtle: shrievalty more commonly denotes the office itself as a continuing institution or the sheriff's jurisdiction, while sheriffalty emphasizes the temporal period of a particular person's service. Neither distinction is consistently observed in the older literature, and researchers should not assume a meaningful difference when both terms appear in the same corpus. A third variant, shrieveship, appears occasionally in English sources and carries the same range of meanings.
Why It Matters in Research
Sheriffalty appears almost exclusively in older English legal materials. It is a term of historical practice rather than modern usage, and researchers are unlikely to encounter it in any American legal source after the mid-nineteenth century. Its primary value in the Law Mind corpus is as a dating and attribution tool: when a historical document refers to actions taken "during the sheriffalty of" a named individual, the term anchors those actions to a specific tenure.
Researchers should be alert to the fact that the sheriff's office in English legal history carried significant procedural responsibilities — execution of writs, custody of prisoners, return of process — and disputes over whether an act was performed within or outside a valid sheriffalty could affect the legal validity of those acts. A writ executed after a sheriff's term had expired, for example, could be challenged on that basis.
The term also appears in records relating to the farm of the sheriff (the sheriff's financial obligations to the crown), where the duration of the sheriffalty determined the accounting period. In that context, sheriffalty functions as a fiscal term as much as a legal one.
Because the term is rare and archaic, it may be misread or miscategorized in digitized historical sources. Variant spellings (sherifalty, sheriffaltie, sheriffalty) appear in older manuscripts and early print sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Burrill — agree on the core definition: the time of a man's being sheriff; the term of a sheriff's office. All three attribute the definition to Cowell, referring to John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), a foundational glossary of English legal terms. This attribution is consistent across the dictionary tradition and suggests the term passed into legal lexicography largely unchanged from its early modern English source.
None of the three dictionaries elaborate beyond the two-sentence definition. There is no discussion of how the term was used in practice, what legal consequences attached to the boundaries of a sheriffalty, or how it related to shrievalty. Burrill and Black's second edition are essentially identical in their treatment. The absence of development across editions suggests the term had already become a relic by the time these dictionaries were compiled — preserved for completeness rather than active utility.
Jurisdictional Note
Sheriffalty as a term is essentially confined to English legal history and early American materials derived from English practice. American jurisdictions developed their own statutory frameworks for the sheriff's office, and the term does not appear in modern American legal usage. Researchers working in colonial American records may encounter it, but it carries no operative legal meaning in any current American jurisdiction.