Definition
In old German and Anglo-Saxon legal geography, "wig" (also rendered as "wic" or "wich" in related forms) denoted either (1) a bay of the sea or inlet of a river, or (2) a wood or grove. Both senses appear as boundary and land-description terms in early Germanic and English legal instruments, particularly in charters, grants, and conveyances where natural features defined the metes of a parcel or the jurisdiction of a territory.
These are not active terms in modern legal practice. Their significance is entirely historical and documentary: a researcher encountering "wig" in a pre-Conquest or early medieval legal text must determine from context whether the reference is to a body of water or to woodland.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A head of real or synthetic hair worn on the head to disguise baldness, for cultural or religious reasons, for fashion, or by actors. Also informally, a bigwig (a person of importance). Among fishermen, an old seal.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A covering for the head consisting of interwoven or united hair, worn to supply deficiency of natural hair, for ornament, or as part of official or professional dress — notably worn in England by judges and barristers as a mark of office.
The gap here is total. The legal meaning drawn from Burrill has nothing to do with hairpieces or professional dress. A researcher who approaches this term expecting either the modern colloquial meaning or even the legally adjacent meaning (the courtroom wig of English judicial tradition) will find something entirely different: an archaic geographic term from old Germanic land law. The Webster's 1913 definition is culturally closer to legal usage in one narrow sense — the English barrister's and judge's wig is a genuine legal institution — but that usage never produced a technical legal definition; "wig" in that sense is professional custom, not a term of art.
Common Confusion
Two entirely separate associations attach to this word in legal contexts. First, researchers familiar with English and Commonwealth legal tradition may associate "wig" exclusively with the horsehair wigs worn by barristers and judges — a meaningful symbol of the profession but not a defined legal term. Second, the term as recorded in Burrill is a relic of old Germanic land terminology with no connection to courtroom dress. Conflating these two associations produces confusion about why the word appears in a law dictionary at all. Burrill is recording the geographic/land-law sense; he is not defining the professional garment.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Anglo-Saxon land grants, early Norman charters, or German territorial documents may encounter "wig" or cognate spellings as a geographic descriptor. Because the word has such a strong modern association with something else entirely, it is easily misread or passed over.
Two distinct meanings — bay/inlet and wood/grove — coexist under the same headword in Burrill, which means the term requires contextual resolution every time it appears. A conveyance bounding land "to the wig" could be referencing a waterway or a stand of timber; these are materially different for establishing historical property lines or jurisdictional limits.
The Spelman citation in Burrill (referencing Beatus Rhenanus, Rerum Germanicarum libri tres, lib. 3, fol. 217) points toward a Continental Germanic legal geography tradition. Researchers pursuing the waterway sense may find more developed treatment in German legal historical sources than in English common law materials.
This term is unlikely to appear in post-Conquest English legal records as an operative word of art, but it may surface in translated or transcribed pre-Conquest documents, glossaries appended to medieval records, or scholarly commentary on Anglo-Saxon land tenure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole source on the legal shelf for this term, and his entry is brief. He records two meanings — bay/inlet and wood/grove — and attributes both to Spelman, who in turn cites Beatus Rhenanus. This chain of citation is characteristic of Burrill's method with archaic Germanic terms: he is transmitting a glossarial tradition rather than reporting terms still in active legal use.
What historical dictionaries generally miss is any cross-reference to the cognate forms "wic," "wick," and "wich" that appear more frequently in place-name scholarship and in some charter glossaries. The "wich" form in particular survives in English place names (Norwich, Ipswich, Greenwich) and carries the bay/harbor/settlement sense into a much larger body of topographical and legal-historical literature. Burrill's isolated "wig" entry, without these connections, understates the term's broader documentary footprint.
No divergence exists among historical legal dictionaries because Burrill appears to be the primary — possibly sole — English-language legal dictionary to record this term. Researchers should not expect confirmation or elaboration from Black's or Bouvier's.
Jurisdictional Note
The geographic sense of "wig" is a term of old German and Anglo-Saxon law with no jurisdictional relevance in any modern legal system. It is relevant only to historical research into Germanic territorial law and early English land instruments.