Bailiwick

Bailiwick (pronounced bey-luh-wik)

(1) In law, the district or area within which a bailie or bailiff has jurisdiction.

(2) A person's area of skill, knowledge, authority, or work.

1425–75: From the late Middle English, the construct being baili- (or bailie) + wick (district of a bailiff, jurisdiction of a royal officer or under-sheriff), a mid-fifteenth century contraction of baillifwik, from bailiff + the Middle English wik, from the Old English wic (village).  The figurative sense of "one's natural or proper sphere" was a creation of American English first recorded in 1843.

From the Ancien Régime

Bailiwick’s origin was in pre-revolutionary France.  Under the Ancien Régime, the bailli (bailiff in the Old French) was the king's representative in a bailliage, in charge of the application of justice and the machinery of local administration.  For historic reasons, in the southern provinces, the more frequently used term was sénéchal and they discharged duties similar to a bailli in a sénéchaussée.  The network of baillages, structurally the most enduring creation of early-Modern France, was created during the thirteenth century, using mostly the geographical boundaries of the earlier medieval fiscal and tax divisions (the baillie) which had been the systems of the various dukedoms and principalities.  In English, the French bailie was combined with the Anglo-Saxon suffix “-wic” (village), the compound meaning literally “bailiff's village”, and defining the geographic scope of each bailiwick.  In the nineteenth century, it was absorbed into American English as a metaphor for a sphere of knowledge or activity.  The term survives in administrative usage in the British Crown dependencies of the Channel Islands which are grouped into two bailiwicks (1), Jersey (Jersey, and the uninhabited islets (Minquiers & Écréhous et al) and (2), Guernsey (Guernsey, Sark, Alderney, Brecqhou, Herm, Jethou & Lihou).  A Bailiff is the head of each Channel Island bailiwick.