Definition
In historical legal Latin, TAMA is a Latinized name for the river Tame — a watercourse appearing in English records with two distinct geographic referents: the river Tame in Oxfordshire and the river Tame in Staffordshire. As a locative term in medieval legal instruments, it identifies one of these waterways by their classical or Latinate designation, typically for purposes of boundary description, charter grants, fishery rights, navigation rights, or jurisdictional limits tied to named waterways.
The term belongs to a cluster of closely related Latin river-name entries in historical legal dictionaries, alongside:
- TAMARA (Tamarus, Tambra) — the river Tamar in Cornwall
- TAMISIA / TAMISIS (Thamisia, Thamesis) — the river Thames
- TAMAWORDINA (Tamworthia) — Tamworth in Staffordshire
These are not legal concepts in the analytical sense. They are geographical identifiers — the Latinate vocabulary through which medieval scribes and lawyers fixed the location of land, the scope of grants, or the territorial reach of navigational and fishery regulations in formal instruments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A form of votive offering in the Eastern Orthodox Church, particularly the Greek Orthodox Church — a small metal plaque bearing an embossed image symbolizing the subject of a prayer for which the offering is made.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed.
The legal and ecclesiastical uses of "tama" share no meaningful connection. A researcher encountering "tama" in a Greek Orthodox or Eastern Christian devotional context will find a completely different term from the medieval English legal Latin. The overlap is purely phonetic. No common-to-legal meaning gap requires navigation; these are simply two unrelated words that happen to share a spelling.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical significance of TAMA in legal research is almost entirely geographic and documentary. Researchers working with medieval English charters, royal grants, fishery records, or boundary instruments — particularly those originating from Oxfordshire or Staffordshire — may encounter Tama or Tame as a boundary marker or locative reference. The challenge is disambiguation: two different rivers carry this name in two different counties, and a medieval instrument referencing "Tama" without additional geographic context requires careful attention to surrounding placename evidence to determine which river is meant.
The broader cluster of Thames-related Latin names (TAMISIA, TAMISIS, THAMESIS) may create confusion in documents touching on navigation law or fishery rights. Magna Carta c. 23 (9 Hen. III), cited in Burrill, uses TAMISIA in the context of removing fish-weirs (kydells) from the Thames and other rivers — a provision with real jurisdictional and commercial weight. A researcher tracking references to that provision across Latin manuscripts must recognize all variant spellings.
The deeper trap is treating these entries as having any analytical legal content. TAMA is a locative label, not a legal doctrine. Its appearance in a document tells the researcher where, not what rule applies.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary handles TAMA as one entry in a compact series of river-name identifications. The treatment is lexicographic-geographic rather than doctrinal: Burrill is simply supplying the English equivalents of Latin place-names so that a reader of a medieval instrument can orient himself geographically.
Burrill's entry clusters TAMA with TAMARA, TAMISIA, TAMISIS, and TAMAWORDINA — treating them as a family of related river and town names rather than as independent entries. This is editorially sensible but means a researcher must scan surrounding entries to capture the full geographic vocabulary of this region. The Magna Carta reference attached to TAMISIA is Burrill's sole citation to legal authority in this cluster, confirming that the legal relevance of these names is primarily as locators in instruments governed by rules about navigation and fishery rather than as terms of art in themselves.
No other source dictionary in the Law Mind corpus covers TAMA. The single-source situation means Burrill's geographic identifications should be cross-checked against independent historical atlases or place-name scholarship when the identity of a specific river is outcome-determinative for a research question.
Jurisdictional Note
These river-name entries are specific to English (and to a lesser degree, Cornish and Welsh border) legal geography. They appear in instruments of the English common law tradition and have no application in continental civil law or canon law contexts.