Definition
In old English law, a solidata was a rent or payment measured in shillings — specifically, a shilling's worth of rent. The term denotes a unit of rent income rather than a physical quantity of land, though in practice it could serve as a measure of a holding's value. The solidata belongs to the family of archaic rent-unit terms used in medieval English property and tenure law to express obligations owed by a tenant to a lord.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering solidata in historical records — particularly in plea rolls, extent records, or treatises on feudal tenure — should understand that the term is a unit of valuation, not a description of acreage or physical extent. It answers the question "how much rent?" not "how much land?" This distinction matters when attempting to reconstruct the economic value or legal significance of a medieval holding.
The term appears in Fleta, a late thirteenth-century Latin treatise on English law, which is the primary source Burrill cites. Fleta is part of the Law Mind corpus of historical legal treatises and is closely related to Bracton's work; researchers consulting Fleta should be aware that the text exists in manuscript and early printed forms, and that the chapter and section numbering can vary across editions. Burrill's references to lib. 4, c. 5, § 6 and lib. 6, c. 22, § 1 are the anchoring citations for this term.
Solidata is rarely encountered outside of Latin legal records and treatises from the medieval period. It will not appear in modern statutory or case law. Researchers working on feudal tenure, copyhold, or the history of rent charges will be most likely to encounter this term, and should approach it as a paleographic and diplomatic term requiring contextual interpretation rather than a living legal concept.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary treatment in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill defines solidata as "a shilling rent" and derives it from solidus (a shilling), citing Fleta in two separate locations. The definition is terse but accurate in pointing to the monetary, rather than territorial, character of the unit.
No other major historical law dictionaries in the standard shelf — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Black's in its early editions — give the term independent treatment, which is itself informative: solidata was obscure even by the standards of legal antiquarianism. Its presence in Burrill reflects that dictionary's particular ambition to recover Latin and Anglo-Norman terms from medieval sources. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a pointer to Fleta rather than as a self-contained explanation.
The derivation from solidus connects solidata to a broader vocabulary of shilling-based rent units in medieval English and continental law. The solidus itself was a Roman coin unit that migrated into medieval European monetary reckoning and gave rise to the abbreviation "s." for shilling in English currency notation — a lineage that illuminates why rent obligations in this era were so often expressed in solidus-derived terminology.
Jurisdictional Note
Solidata is a term of medieval English law. It has no counterpart in Scots, Irish, or continental legal systems under this name, though functionally analogous rent-unit terms existed across feudal Europe.