Definition
Auxilium vice comiti (Latin: "aid to the sheriff") is an archaic English feudal duty — a payment or contribution made to the sheriff of a county. The obligation was owed by persons within the sheriff's jurisdiction and functioned as a form of financial support for the office of sheriff, distinct from ordinary fines or fees collected through judicial process.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources — medieval records, early common law treatises, and county administrative documents — where the financial obligations running to sheriffs were numerous and varied. Researchers encountering the term in historical records should treat it as a marker of feudal administrative finance rather than anything resembling modern taxation or court fees.
The primary trap is conflation: the sheriff's office generated a cluster of overlapping duties, tolls, and contributions under different names. Auxilium vice comiti is specifically an aid or contribution directed to the sheriff as officeholder, not a penalty or a judicial fee. Distinguishing it from other sheriff-related payments (such as sheriff's tourn fees or common fine) requires attention to context in the source document.
Because Bouvier cites only Cowel and Whishaw — both secondary compilers of older English legal vocabulary — the term had already receded from active legal use by the time American law dictionaries were being written. Its presence in a legal document is itself a dating clue: sources using this term are almost certainly drawing on English common law materials predating significant sheriff reform.
Researchers using Law Mind should follow threads into sources treating the sheriff's office in English county administration, feudal tenure obligations, and the history of local government finance. The term will not appear in American statutory or case law in any operative sense.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the sole historical dictionary source available here, and its treatment is minimal: "An ancient duty paid to sheriffs," with citations to Cowel's Interpreter and Whishaw's New Law Dictionary. This is characteristic of how both Bouvier and his predecessors handled obsolete feudal terminology — preserving the term for completeness rather than practical guidance.
Cowel's Interpreter (1607) and Whishaw's work are themselves compilations of older English legal vocabulary, meaning the term was already antiquarian by the seventeenth century. No meaningful divergence appears across historical sources because so few engaged the term at all. The entry represents the outer edge of the common law dictionary tradition: terms retained because they might surface in old documents, not because they were operative.
What the historical sources do not provide — and what modern legal scholarship would need to supply — is any substantive account of how this duty was assessed, who owed it, whether it was in money or kind, or how it related to the broader structure of feudal county finance. Researchers needing that level of detail should turn to English legal history scholarship on the medieval shrievalty rather than the dictionary tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
Entirely English in origin and application. The term has no recognized American legal counterpart and no operative significance in any U.S. jurisdiction. It survives only as a historical reference point in legal dictionaries derived from the English common law tradition.