Definition
An archaic regional term for the month of February, used in South Wales. The word appears in legal and administrative documents originating from that region and is preserved in historical legal dictionaries primarily as a calendrical reference necessary for dating instruments, records, and proceedings.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical significance of this term is narrow but consequential in one specific context: reading and dating historical Welsh legal documents. A researcher encountering "sowlegrove" in a manuscript, deed, lease, or court record from South Wales must recognize it as a month designation — February — rather than a place name, personal name, or substantive legal term. Misreading it could produce an error in the dating of an instrument by an entire month, which in turn could affect conclusions about priority, limitation periods, or the sequence of transactional events.
The term illustrates a broader challenge in historical legal research involving Wales: Welsh and Anglo-Welsh administrative practice drew on regional vernacular vocabulary that does not appear in standard English legal dictionaries of the period. Researchers working in ecclesiastical records, manorial court rolls, or conveyancing documents from medieval and early modern South Wales should be alert to similar calendrical and administrative regionalisms that may resist identification through standard English-language tools.
Because this term appears only as a definitional reference in Black's, with no doctrinal content attached, it is not a term that will appear in case law, treatises on substantive doctrine, or statutory materials. Its utility is essentially paleographic and archival.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary carry identical, single-sentence entries: "February; so called in South Wales. Cowell." The citation to Cowell refers to John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), a glossary of legal and administrative terms that served as a primary reference for obscure and regional vocabulary in English legal practice. Both Black's editions rely entirely on Cowell and add nothing beyond his identification of the term.
Neither edition provides context about how widely the term circulated, whether it appeared in formal court records or only in informal documents, or whether it was used outside South Wales. The entries are consistent with each other and with the apparent purpose of Cowell's work: cataloguing unusual terms a practitioner or scholar might encounter without recognizing. There is no divergence between the two Black's editions on this term, nor any substantive elaboration in either.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to South Wales and has no documented use in English legal practice outside that region. Researchers working with documents from other parts of Wales or England should not expect to encounter it.