Definition
A fee historically collected by the sheriff in England from every criminal defendant who was acquitted at trial. The payment was extracted from the prisoner upon discharge — meaning an innocent person, having been cleared by the court, was nonetheless required to pay a fee to the sheriff before being released. The fee was not statutory in origin but arose from long-standing custom ("time out of mind"), placing it among the class of unofficial exactions that accumulated around court and prison administration in pre-modern English practice.
Bar fee is an abolished term. It has no operative legal meaning in modern law and appears in legal literature solely in historical and antiquarian contexts.
Common Confusion
The term "bar" here does not refer to the legal profession, the courtroom bar (the railing separating counsel from the public gallery), or any procedural bar to a claim. Researchers encountering "bar fee" should not read it as a licensing fee, court filing fee, or a fee charged to attorneys. The reference is specifically to the sheriff's extortion-adjacent charge levied on acquitted prisoners. The proximity of this term to phrases like "bar of the court" or "called to the bar" is coincidental.
Why It Matters in Research
Bar fee is a dead-letter term. It will not appear in any modern statute, regulation, or court opinion as a live legal concept. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in three contexts:
First, in historical treatises and abridgments — particularly Bacon's Abridgement under the heading "Extortion," which is the primary original authority cited by all three historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus. Any research tracing the history of official extortion, corruption of court officers, or the evolution of sheriff's powers should be aware that bar fee represents exactly the kind of practice those reform statutes targeted.
Second, in English legal history sources covering the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The abolishing statutes — 14 Geo. III c. 26, 55 Geo. III c. 50, and 8 & 9 Vict. c. 114 — bracket a reform period spanning roughly 1774 to 1845. Researchers working on the legislative history of court reform, prison administration, or the curtailment of sheriff's customary fees will find bar fee appearing alongside similar abolitions.
Third, as a negative space marker in comparative legal history. American law never adopted bar fee. Its absence from American practice makes it useful for distinguishing which English common law customs crossed the Atlantic and which did not.
One navigational caution: the 2nd edition of Black's contains a typographical error in the statute citation, rendering "55 Geo. III" as "355 Geo. III." The correct citation is 55 Geo. III c. 50, consistent with Bouvier's and the 1st edition of Black's.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three Law Mind corpus sources — Black's Law Dictionary (1st edition), Black's Law Dictionary (2nd edition), and Bouvier's Law Dictionary — are in near-complete agreement. All three define bar fee identically: a fee taken by the sheriff for every prisoner acquitted, ancient in custom, abolished by the same sequence of English statutes. The verbal overlap is close enough to suggest that Black's drew directly on Bouvier's for this entry, a common pattern across these dictionaries for obscure historical terms.
None of the three sources explain the mechanism by which the fee was justified in its time, the amounts typically charged, or the political circumstances of its abolition. Bacon's Abridgement, cited by all three under the heading "Extortion," is the deeper source for anyone requiring that level of detail. The dictionaries treat bar fee as a closed historical artifact rather than a contested or evolving concept, and that treatment is accurate — there is no meaningful doctrinal dispute here.
The classification of bar fee under "Extortion" in Bacon's Abridgement is itself historically significant. It signals that even contemporaries recognized the fee as sitting at the boundary of legitimate official compensation and wrongful exaction, a tension that ultimately drove abolition.
Jurisdictional Note
Bar fee is exclusively an English legal concept and has no equivalent in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. No U.S. state adopted it as part of inherited English common law. Research outside English legal history has no use for this term.