Definition
In medieval and early English law, *turnus* (Latin: "the turn") refers to the sheriff's tourn — a twice-yearly court held by the sheriff as he made his circuit through the hundreds of his county. The turnus was a court of record held within each hundred at its customary place, convened once after Easter and once after Michaelmas. It functioned primarily as a criminal presentment court with jurisdiction over minor offenses, frankpledge matters, and the maintenance of local order. The term appears in Latin legal texts and statutory provisions as the formal designation for what English-language sources render as the "tourn" or "sheriff's tourn."
Common Confusion
TURNUS and TOURN are the same institution — the first is the Latin form found in legal instruments, writs, and early statutes; the second is the anglicized rendering used in common-law treatises and later commentary. Researchers encountering *turnus* in a Latin text and *tourn* in an English-language source should treat them as equivalent. Confusion can also arise between the turnus and the court leet: both were local courts with overlapping jurisdictions, and lords of manors sometimes held court leets in the same hundred. The turnus, however, was the sheriff's court and derived its authority from the Crown through the sheriff's office, not from a private franchise grant.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter *turnus* almost exclusively in Latin legal texts — original statutes, writs, plea rolls, and early treatises composed before the anglicization of legal terminology was complete. The operative statutory provision, frequently quoted in the dictionaries, is drawn from Magna Carta and its reissues, establishing the twice-yearly schedule and the requirement that the court meet at its accustomed place. This locates the turnus at the intersection of constitutional limitation on sheriff's power and the practical machinery of hundred-court administration.
The key research trap is treating *turnus* as a distinct institution from the tourn when cross-referencing between Latin and English sources. Burrill directs readers to TOURN, which is where the substantive English-language commentary accumulates in the historical dictionaries. Any search limited to *turnus* in anglicized legal collections will return sparse results; the bulk of doctrine and commentary travels under "tourn" or "sheriff's tourn."
For corpus researchers, the term is a marker of Latin legal draftsmanship and tends to appear in materials from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. Its frequency declines sharply in post-medieval sources as English-language legal writing displaced Latin in most procedural contexts. When it appears in later antiquarian or treatise writing, it is typically a deliberate archaism or a direct quotation from an earlier instrument.
The jurisdictional ceiling on the turnus — it could not hold pleas of the Crown in the full sense — and the procedural requirement that it sit only twice yearly and only at customary locations made it a relatively constrained institution, and its practical importance diminished well before it was formally abolished.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is concise and functional: it identifies *turnus* as the Latin equivalent of the sheriff's tourn, cites the relevant Magna Carta provision in full Latin, and cross-references the TOURN entry where Burrill develops the doctrine at length. The quoted passage — *nisi bis in anno, et non nisi in loco debito et consueto* ("not unless twice in a year, and not unless in the due and accustomed place") — captures the two central constitutional constraints on the sheriff's tourn that recur throughout historical commentary.
Because Burrill is the sole historical dictionary source available for this entry, the synthesis is necessarily limited. The major English legal dictionaries — Jacob, Tomlin, Bouvier in his more expansive editions — address the sheriff's tourn under the anglicized spelling and provide considerably more procedural detail. Researchers needing the full doctrinal account should move directly to those TOURN entries rather than expecting *turnus* entries to carry substantive weight. The Latin form is primarily a finding tool and a signal of documentary provenance, not itself a vehicle for extended legal analysis in the historical dictionary tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
The turnus/tourn was a distinctly English institution tied to the hundred system and the office of the sheriff as constituted under English common law. It has no direct American counterpart; the institution did not transplant to the colonies, and American legal sources use the term only in historical or comparative contexts.