Definition
Statutum Sessionum (Latin: "statute session") is a historical English legal institution — a periodic local assembly held within each hundred, the administrative subdivision below the county, at which constables and householders gathered by custom to regulate labor relations. The assembly's functions included the ordering of servants, resolving disputes between masters and servants, and setting wage rates. Its authority derived principally from the Statute of Artificers, 5 Eliz. c. 4 (1563), which codified and gave statutory backing to the local administration of labor and service relationships that had long operated through custom and earlier labor legislation.
The term is Latin and functions as a proper name for the institution rather than a generic category: it designates this specific meeting, not statutes or sessions generally.
Common Confusion
The phrase combines two ordinary Latin legal words — statutum (statute, or something established) and sessionum (of sessions) — and a researcher unfamiliar with the term may initially read it as a generic reference to statutory sessions of a court or legislature. It is neither. Statutum Sessionum refers to a specific administrative assembly rooted in labor regulation, not to any judicial or parliamentary proceeding. It should not be confused with quarter sessions, petty sessions, or the sessions of Parliament, all of which operated through distinct legal frameworks.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in English legal sources predating the nineteenth century, particularly materials dealing with the law of master and servant, labor regulation, and local administrative governance under the Statute of Artificers. Researchers working in those areas should note several navigational points.
First, the institutional context matters. The hundred was the relevant administrative unit; Statutum Sessionum was not a county-level or national proceeding. Research into local records — hundred rolls, constables' accounts, presentments — is more likely to surface evidence of these assemblies than central court records.
Second, the Statute of Artificers (5 Eliz. c. 4, 1563) is the foundational statutory reference. That act reorganized and systematized English labor law in ways that persisted until the nineteenth century repeal of its provisions. Understanding the Statutum Sessionum requires understanding the broader regulatory scheme of that statute, including its apprenticeship requirements, service terms, and wage-setting mechanisms. Researchers tracing labor law history will find that the institution functioned as the local enforcement and administrative layer beneath the national statute.
Third, the institution effectively disappears from legal literature after the repeal of the Statute of Artificers provisions in the early nineteenth century (primarily through statutes of 1813–1814 and the wholesale repeal of wage-assessment clauses). Historical dictionaries written after that period treat Statutum Sessionum as a purely antiquarian entry. Researchers should not assume the institution had any active operation or legal significance after that point.
Fourth, the term does not appear to have generated significant common law doctrine or reported case law under its own name. Its legal life was primarily administrative and local rather than litigated.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary agree closely on this entry — to the point of near-identical phrasing. Both define the institution as a meeting of constables and householders within each hundred, both identify the three core functions (ordering of servants, resolving master-servant disputes, rating wages), and both cite 5 Eliz. c. 4 as the governing authority. Neither dictionary offers significant elaboration beyond this summary.
Black's preserves a fragment of a related maxim — Statutum speciale statuto speciali non derogat (from Jenk. Cent. 199: "One special statute does not derogate from another special statute") — which appears to have been a typographical or formatting artifact of the printed edition, running on from the Statutum Sessionum entry. Researchers should treat this maxim as a separate entry, not part of the Statutum Sessionum definition.
What neither source addresses: the practical operation of these assemblies, their relationship to justices of the peace (who also had wage-setting authority under the same statute), their survival or decline in actual practice across the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, or regional variation in their observance. For that level of detail, researchers should look beyond the legal dictionaries to social and legal history of early modern England, including scholarship on the Statute of Artificers.
Jurisdictional Note
Statutum Sessionum is purely an English legal institution with no direct counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Colonial American labor law developed along different lines, and the hundred as an administrative unit never took the same form in the colonies. This term has no operative significance outside English legal history.