Definition
Charitable gifts or relief—whether money, food, clothing, or other necessaries—bestowed upon the poor. In law, alms carries two related but distinct registers:
1. Private charity: Any voluntary gift given by an individual for the relief of the poor.
2. Public relief: That which is distributed by public authority for the support of the poor, as distinguished from private donation.
The legal significance of alms arises primarily in older contexts: tenure law (frankalmoign, or "free alms," was a form of land tenure by which ecclesiastical bodies held land in exchange for spiritual services rather than secular duties), mortmain doctrine (gifts in alms to religious institutions were heavily regulated to prevent land from passing into perpetual ecclesiastical hands), and election law (historically, distributing alms near an election could constitute undue influence or corrupt practice).
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Something given to the poor as charity, such as money, clothing, or food.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Anything given gratuitously to relieve the poor, as money, food, or clothing; a gift of charity. Webster's also cross-references tenure by free alms (frankalmoign) as a legal application.
The common and legal meanings are largely aligned at their core, but the legal record extends alms into structural doctrines—tenure, mortmain, and electoral integrity—that the ordinary meaning does not reach. A researcher encountering alms in a legal source may be dealing with a term of art in land law or statutory regulation, not merely a synonym for charity.
Common Confusion
Alms is sometimes used interchangeably with charity in older sources, but the two are not legally identical. Charity as a legal concept encompasses a broader category of benevolent purpose recognized in equity and later in charitable trust doctrine. Alms is narrower: it denotes the actual gift or relief to the poor, not the legal framework organizing such giving. Almshouses, alms-fees (such as Peter-pence, also called almsfloh), and public alms distributions each represent distinct institutional forms that a researcher may encounter under related but separate headings.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter alms most heavily in three areas of the Law Mind corpus:
First, in land law and tenure materials, alms is inseparable from frankalmoign. Pre-modern English tenure sources organize land-holding by the service owed, and tenure in free alms was the baseline category for ecclesiastical grants. Do not expect modern property law sources to carry this usage; it largely disappears after the Tenures Abolition Act 1660 and is vestigial in American law.
Second, in mortmain and charitable uses materials, gifts in alms to religious institutions generated extensive litigation and legislative intervention from the Statute of Mortmain (1279) onward. Bouvier cross-references Shelford on Mortmain for this line of authority. Researchers working in equity or charitable trust history will find alms in the background of cases involving perpetual institutional gifts.
Third, in electoral law, 19th-century English and American sources treat the distribution of alms by candidates or their agents near election time as a species of bribery or corrupt influence. Bouvier cites Haywood's Election Cases and Douglas's Election Cases for this application. This usage is largely obsolete in modern electoral law but appears regularly in historical election-contest materials.
The term almsfloh (or alms money) appears in older glossaries as a synonym for Peter-pence—the annual tribute paid to Rome—and is worth flagging for researchers in ecclesiastical law or medieval fiscal history.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries converge on the same core definition: charitable donations or relief bestowed upon the poor, including that distributed by public authority. The formulations are nearly identical across Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier, suggesting the term had settled into routine legal vocabulary by the 19th century without significant doctrinal dispute about its meaning.
Bouvier adds the citation to almsfloh/almesfloh as alms money, connecting the term to Peter-pence and ecclesiastical fiscal history—a thread Black's does not pursue. This is a useful divergence for researchers working in canon law or ecclesiastical revenue.
Neither edition of Black's nor Bouvier engages the tenure-law dimension (frankalmoign) directly under this heading, though Webster's 1913 cross-references it. Researchers should not rely on these dictionary entries alone for the land-law applications of alms; the frankalmoign entry and treatise sources on tenure will be necessary complements.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: the electoral law application, which appears in the Bouvier citations but is not surfaced as a distinct usage; and the full arc of mortmain regulation, which sits behind the Shelford citation without elaboration.
Jurisdictional Note
In English law, the alms-tenure connection (frankalmoign) and mortmain regulation produced a body of doctrine with no precise American equivalent. American jurisdictions largely absorbed the concept through charitable trust law and tax-exemption frameworks rather than tenure or mortmain doctrine. Researchers working in American materials will encounter alms primarily in poor-law, municipal relief, and electoral-fraud contexts rather than in property or tenure law.