Definition
Aulnage is an alternative spelling of alnage — a historical English regulatory measure governing the inspection, measurement, and quality certification of woolen cloth. The term refers both to the official act of measuring cloth (particularly by the ell, a unit of length) and to the tax or duty collected in connection with that inspection. The officer responsible for carrying out these functions was known as the aulnager or alnager, an appointed crown official. Aulnage as a system was a medieval and early modern institution designed to enforce standards of manufacture and to generate royal revenue from the textile trade. It fell into obsolescence as the wool trade declined and regulatory structures shifted, and the office of alnager was formally abolished in England in the late seventeenth century.
Common Confusion
Aulnage and alnage are the same term — one is simply a variant spelling of the other, reflecting inconsistent orthography across centuries of legal manuscripts and printed sources. Researchers encountering either form in historical documents should treat them as interchangeable and cross-reference both spellings when searching digitized corpora. A third variant, ulnage, occasionally appears in older texts and carries the same meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a historical research term. No modern legal system retains the institution of aulnage or alnage in operative form, so it will surface in primary sources — statutes, crown records, trade regulations, and legal treatises — from roughly the thirteenth through the late seventeenth centuries.
The primary research trap here is spelling fragmentation. Historical sources use aulnage, alnage, ulnage, and further variants without consistency. A corpus search limited to a single spelling will miss substantial material. Researchers working in digitized manuscript collections or early print sources should run searches on all major variants before drawing conclusions about frequency or distribution.
The second trap is the cross-reference chain in the historical dictionaries themselves. Black's (1st ed.) entry for aulnage says only "See ALNAGE." Black's (2nd ed.) says "See ALNAGER." Burrill and Rapalje & Lawrence similarly deflect to alnage. This means the substantive content is always housed under the alnage entry, not under aulnage. A researcher who stops at the aulnage entry without following the cross-reference will find nothing of substance.
Within the Law Mind corpus, this term connects most directly to the history of English trade regulation, crown revenue mechanisms, and the administrative apparatus of wool and cloth commerce. It may appear incidentally in discussions of guild regulation, assize law, and the economic history of the English textile industry.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are unanimous in treating aulnage as a mere spelling variant of alnage, with no independent substantive content housed under this headword. Black's (1st ed.) entry for aulnage is a fragment that appears to contain misdirected text — the phrase "a grantor or vendor / judgment, on account of some matter of de" suggests a typographical or editorial error in that source, not a genuine definition of aulnage. Researchers should disregard this passage as corrupted text rather than treating it as a secondary meaning. Black's (2nd ed.), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Burrill all simply redirect to alnage or alnager without adding independent content. The historical dictionaries thus provide no divergent interpretations of aulnage and are useful here primarily as confirmation that the term has always been understood as a variant form, not as a distinct legal concept.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: ALNAGE for the full treatment of the office, its statutory basis, revenue function, and abolition.