Definition
A Latin form of a proper place name appearing in historical legal instruments and records. Tintagium is the Latinized designation for Tintagel, a coastal location in Cornwall, England. The term has no independent legal meaning beyond its function as a geographical identifier — it appears in medieval and early modern legal documents, charters, writs, and conveyances where Latin place-name conventions required localities to be rendered in Latinized form.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering TINTAGIUM in historical legal documents need to recognize it immediately as a geographical reference rather than a legal concept. Its significance is navigational: the term signals Cornwall jurisdiction and points toward records associated with that region's manorial courts, royal charters, or property instruments.
Several practical traps exist. First, Latinized place names were not standardized across scribes and periods — variant spellings may appear in the corpus, and TINTAGIUM may appear in forms that are not immediately recognizable as referring to Tintagel. Second, because Tintagel carried royal and historical significance in English tradition (as a site associated with Arthurian legend and Cornish earldom), documents referencing TINTAGIUM may relate to Crown grants, earldom conveyances, or duchy of Cornwall instruments of particular historical weight. The Duchy of Cornwall has a continuous legal existence and generated substantial documentary records; a researcher tracing property or jurisdictional questions tied to this region will benefit from recognizing the Latinized form. Third, the entry in Burrill appears in close proximity to TOLIAPIS (the isle of Sheppey in Kent), suggesting these entries function as a small gazetteer of Latinized English place names — researchers should treat this section of Burrill as a reference tool for decoding geographical references in Latin instruments, not as substantive legal doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary entry, and it is minimal: the entry gives only the modern English equivalent (Tintagel in Cornwall) without elaboration, context, or legal commentary. This brevity is characteristic of how historical dictionaries handled Latinized place names — they were included for decoding purposes rather than doctrinal explanation.
The entry's placement alongside TOLIAPIS (isle of Sheppey) confirms that Burrill treated these as reference entries for practitioners and researchers who needed to translate Latin geographical terms encountered in older instruments. No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to independently address TINTAGIUM, which reflects how narrowly functional these entries were — they served a translation need rather than a conceptual one.
What historical sources do not address: the range of legal instruments in which TINTAGIUM actually appears, the variant spellings a researcher might encounter, or the specific legal regimes (manorial, duchy, Crown grant) to which documents referencing this place might belong. Researchers working with primary sources will need to supplement Burrill with paleographical guides and regional record compilations.
Jurisdictional Note
TINTAGIUM is exclusively a reference to a location in Cornwall, England, and is therefore relevant only to English legal history. Researchers working in Cornish records should be aware that Cornwall held a distinct legal status through the Duchy of Cornwall, which affected the nature and jurisdiction of instruments issued with reference to the region.