bailiwick
Sign in to saveA bailiwick () is usually the area of jurisdiction of a bailiff, and once also applied to territories in which a privately appointed bailiff exercised the sheriff's functions under a royal or imperial writ.
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Encyclopedic overview
5 sectionsContents
- Origin
- Bailiwick of Bicester Market End
- List of Bailiwicks
- References
- External links
A bailiwick () is usually the area of jurisdiction of a bailiff, and once also applied to territories in which a privately appointed bailiff exercised the sheriff's functions under a royal or imperial writ.
In English, the original French combined with , the Anglo-Saxon suffix (meaning a village) to produce a term meaning literally 'bailiff's village'—the original geographic scope of a bailiwick. In the 19th century, it was absorbed into American English as a metaphor for a sphere of knowledge or activity.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “bailiwick” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.