Definition
In old English law, a unit of land measurement equivalent to a plow-land — that is, the amount of land that could be tilled by one plow in a year. The term appears in early English land law as a measure of agrarian productive capacity rather than a fixed acreage, making its precise extent variable by region and soil quality.
---
Common Confusion
SULLERY is easily confused with CARUCATE and PLOW-LAND, and indeed Black's defines it simply as a plow-land, suggesting near-equivalence. The distinction, where one exists, is that CARUCATE was the more widely used Latin-derived term in formal legal instruments, while SULLERY appears more often in vernacular or early English-language contexts. Researchers should not assume the terms are precisely synonymous across all documents without consulting the specific source.
---
Why It Matters in Research
SULLERY is a relic term encountered almost exclusively in medieval English land records, early common law treatises, and historical surveys of agrarian tenure. Researchers working with pre-modern English property documents — particularly those touching manorial records, Domesday-era materials, or early conveyancing instruments — may encounter the term and need to situate it within the broader taxonomy of old English land measurement.
The key navigational point: SULLERY belongs to a family of archaic land units — including HIDE, CARUCATE, VIRGATE, and BOVATE — that measured land by agricultural capacity rather than geometric area. These terms are not interchangeable, and conflating them produces errors in historical land-area calculations. SULLERY and CARUCATE are frequently treated as equivalent in the secondary literature, but researchers should verify this equivalence against the specific regional and documentary context before relying on it.
The reference to "1 Inst. 5" in both Black's editions points to Coke's Institutes of the Laws of England, Book I (Coke on Littleton), a foundational source for old English property concepts. Any corpus research that encounters SULLERY in a legal context is almost certainly dealing with material mediated through Coke or his contemporaries.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary provide nearly identical, minimal entries: a plow-land, with the single citation to Coke's Institutes (1 Inst. 5). The second edition's entry is fragmentary as preserved, but the substance is the same. Neither edition elaborates on regional variation, the relationship to cognate units, or the procedural contexts in which the term appeared.
The brevity of both entries reflects the term's status even by the time Black's was compiled — it was already a purely historical curio, significant for reading antique texts rather than for active legal practice. Neither edition attempts to distinguish SULLERY from CARUCATE or to situate it within the hide system, leaving that analytical work entirely to the researcher.
---
Jurisdictional Note
SULLERY is a term of old English law with no continuing force in any modern jurisdiction. It is relevant only for historical research into English land tenure and documents predating the systematization of property law.
---