Definition
In old European law, a term for dower — the portion of a husband's estate to which a wife was entitled upon his death or upon dissolution of the marriage. The word appears in the laws of the Burgundians and is recorded in early Germanic legal usage as a cognate of the Old Saxon *wituma* or *weotoma*, terms denoting the property or provision given to or settled upon a wife.
Why It Matters in Research
WITTEMON is an archaic term of limited circulation, appearing almost exclusively in sources treating early medieval Germanic or Burgundian law. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a synonym for dower in that context and not expect to find it in English common law sources, Year Books, or post-medieval legal literature. The term's value in the Law Mind corpus is primarily philological and comparative: it marks the Germanic antecedents of dower doctrine as it later developed under English law. A researcher tracing the history of a wife's property rights should use WITTEMON as a signpost to the Germanic tributary of that history, then follow the thread forward through DOWER and MARITAGIUM. Do not expect this term to appear in equity sources, Blackstone, or American legal materials — its habitat is the early medieval glossaries and the learned footnotes of nineteenth-century legal lexicographers.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only shelf-source entry for this term and keeps it appropriately brief. Burrill identifies the Saxon roots (*wituma*, *weotoma*), gives the meaning as dower, and cites the *Leges Burgundionum* (Title 69, § 1) by way of Spelman — a reference to Sir Henry Spelman's *Glossarium Archaiologicum*, the seventeenth-century glossary of obsolete legal and historical terms that remains a standard citation for words of this antiquity. No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus appears to carry an independent entry for the term. The convergence of Burrill and Spelman on a single primary source — the Burgundian laws — underscores how narrow the textual basis for this term actually is. Researchers should not expect corroboration from Bouvier, Black, or other nineteenth-century American lexicographers, as those works drew primarily from English common law sources where the term does not appear.