Definition
Wastellum is a Latin term appearing in medieval English legal and administrative records, denoting a type of bread known as wastel bread. In the context of old English law, the term appears in regulatory provisions governing bread quality, weight, and price — matters historically subject to the Assize of Bread, a form of royal price regulation that fixed the weight and quality of bread loaves in relation to the prevailing price of grain.
Wastel bread occupied a recognized position in the hierarchy of bread grades common to medieval England, distinguished by its quality of flour and method of preparation. Legal and household records of the period classified breads by type, with wastellum representing one of the finer grades, above coarser varieties such as tourte or cocket bread.
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Why It Matters in Research
Wastellum is a term a researcher will encounter almost exclusively in two contexts: medieval English legal texts dealing with the Assize of Bread, and contemporary household or estate management records, including the records of large institutional establishments such as monasteries and noble households. The term signals the intersection of royal regulatory authority over trade and provisions with the day-to-day administration of English manors and courts.
Researchers working with Fleta or Bracton-era sources — roughly the late thirteenth century — should recognize wastellum as part of a technical vocabulary of provisioning law that rarely appears in later materials. By the early modern period, this vocabulary had largely passed out of legal use as the specific grades of bread regulated by the Assize became less rigidly defined in legal instruments.
The primary trap in historical sources is treating wastellum as a term of purely culinary rather than legal significance. In the sources where it appears, it carries regulatory weight: the type of bread designated matters to the legal enforcement of price and weight standards. Misreading the term as mere domestic description misses its function in the text.
Burrill's citation to Fleta, lib. 2, c. 9, §§ 1, 2 is the key anchor for this term. Fleta is a late thirteenth-century English legal treatise, heavily derivative of Bracton, and its provisions on the Assize of Bread are among the most detailed surviving legal treatments of regulated bread grades. Researchers who need the underlying legal framework should follow the Fleta citation directly rather than relying on dictionary summaries.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry for wastellum among the Law Mind shelf sources, defining it concisely as "wastel; a kind of bread" within the context of old English law, and anchoring it to Fleta. The entry is accurate as far as it goes but offers no regulatory context — it functions as an identification tag rather than a substantive explanation.
Historical dictionaries of this period generally handle the provisioning-law vocabulary of medieval England briefly, reflecting the fact that these terms had no living legal significance by the nineteenth century and were encountered primarily by antiquarians and legal historians rather than practitioners. Burrill's entry is representative: it identifies the term and provides a source, but a researcher who needs to understand the legal significance of the bread-grade hierarchy must go to Fleta directly or to scholarly treatments of the Assize of Bread.
No significant divergence or dispute exists in the historical dictionary record on this term — the sources that treat it at all agree on its basic identification. The limitation is one of depth, not disagreement.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Assize of Bread; Medieval English Regulatory Law.
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