Definition
Vicinitas is a Latin term meaning neighborhood or vicinity — the condition of being near or adjacent to a particular place. In legal usage, the term carries two distinct senses:
1. Geographical proximity. The general meaning of nearness or neighborhood, relevant in contexts where local knowledge, local custom, or spatial relationships bear on a legal question.
2. In old Scots law: the verdict of an assize or jury. In this specialized historical usage, vicinitas does not refer to proximity at all, but rather to the body of neighbors summoned to render judgment — and, by extension, to their collective finding. The connection is conceptual: the early jury was understood as a panel of neighbors (vicini) drawn from the locality where the facts arose, persons presumed to have direct knowledge of the matter. The verdict was, in origin, the neighborhood's collective testimony.
Common Confusion
The two meanings of vicinitas are easily conflated because they share a common etymological root (vicinus, neighbor) but function differently in legal texts. A reader encountering vicinitas in a medieval or early modern Latin legal source must determine from context whether the term is being used in its general geographical sense or in the technical Scots procedural sense meaning verdict or assize finding. The geographical sense appears broadly across Latin legal writing; the verdict sense is narrower and specifically associated with Scots sources, particularly the Quoniam Attachiamenta.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with early Scots legal materials — particularly the Quoniam Attachiamenta, the medieval Scots procedural compilation — will encounter vicinitas in a sense that has no direct modern English equivalent and that diverges sharply from the term's ordinary Latin meaning. Translating vicinitas simply as "neighborhood" in such a context produces nonsense or, worse, a plausible but wrong reading.
The broader significance is methodological. Vicinitas illustrates a pattern common in medieval legal Latin: a term rooted in a social or geographical concept becomes technically specialized to describe a legal institution that grew from that concept. The jury began as the neighborhood's voice. Over time, the institutional form — the assize, the verdict — absorbed the vocabulary of its social origins while shedding the literal meaning. Researchers working with Latin legal sources must be alert to this kind of semantic fossilization.
For Law Mind corpus users, this term surfaces most often in:
- Scots legal history sources dealing with the assize and early jury procedure
- Comparative studies of English and Scots procedural development
- Latin-language legal texts requiring close translation
Note also that Spelman's Glossarium, referenced by Burrill via Skene, is a primary point of access for such archaic Scots and Anglo-Latin legal vocabulary. Researchers who encounter vicinitas and related terms in manuscript or early printed sources should cross-check Spelman alongside any modern secondary treatment.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the principal historical dictionary source for this term. His entry is brief but accurately captures both the general Latin meaning (neighborhood, vicinity) and the specialized Scots procedural meaning (verdict of an assize or jury), with citation to the Quoniam Attachiamenta (c. 83) and to Sir John Skene's commentary, as well as to Spelman.
The entry in Burrill reflects the standard approach of mid-nineteenth-century legal lexicography to archaic Scots terms: record the primary authority, note the technical meaning, and flag the secondary scholarly source. What Burrill does not do — and what no single dictionary entry can do — is explain why vicinitas came to mean verdict, or trace the conceptual history from neighborhood assembly to formal judicial finding. That gap must be filled by reference to histories of the Scots and Anglo-Norman jury, where the vicinage concept is treated more fully.
No other entries in the standard historical legal dictionaries (Black's, Bouvier's, Tomlin's) appear to carry this term with developed treatment, suggesting Burrill drew directly on Skene and Spelman rather than on a continuous lexicographical tradition. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a signpost to primary sources rather than as a complete account.
Jurisdictional Note
The technical sense of vicinitas as verdict or assize finding is specific to early Scots law and should not be imported into English common law contexts, where the conceptual vocabulary of the vicinage developed differently and the term itself does not carry this procedural meaning.