Definition
An old English customary practice in which a poor person invited neighbors and friends to drink ale at his home, the gathering serving as an informal mechanism for charitable relief. Attendees were expected to contribute money or goods to assist the host, making the bidale a form of community-organized charity conducted under the social cover of hospitality. The term derives from the combination of *bid* (to invite) and *ale* (the drink served), reflecting the custom's practical structure.
Bidale appears in legal and antiquarian sources primarily as a recognized form of precaria potatoria — a drinking invitation — with acknowledged legal and social significance in the context of poor relief customs predating more formal parish and statutory systems.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern use; appears only in historical and dialectal contexts as a description of a charitable drinking gathering.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "An invitation of friends to drink ale at some poor man's house, and there to contribute in charity for his relief." Marked as Provincial English.
The gap between common and legal usage here is narrow — both Webster's and the legal dictionaries describe the same practice. What legal sources add is the Latin framing (precaria potatoria) and the placement of bidale within the broader structure of customary poor relief, giving the term significance beyond a mere social custom.
Why It Matters in Research
Bidale is an archaic term of purely historical interest. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in one of three contexts: early English legal antiquarianism, studies of customary poor relief before the Elizabethan Poor Laws, or ecclesiastical and manorial records touching on community obligations.
The key research trap is treating bidale as a formal legal institution when it was, in practice, a recognized custom — documented by legal lexicographers because it occupied a space between charity, social obligation, and the law of the poor. Its appearance in Spelman and Cowell, both foundational sources for English legal antiquities, signals that contemporaries viewed it as a matter of record rather than mere folk practice.
Researchers working on the history of English poor relief should note that bidale represents a pre-statutory, community-based mechanism that operated alongside church collections and parish levies. Understanding this fills a gap in the institutional history of poverty law: formal poor relief statutes emerged in part because informal mechanisms like bidale were insufficient and uneven.
The term also surfaces in studies of ale-customs more broadly — scot-ales, clerk-ales, bride-ales — a cluster of communal drinking events with distinct legal and social functions. Distinguishing bidale from these related customs requires attention to the charitable and recipient-centered structure that sets it apart.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary legal source, drawing directly on Spelman's Glossarium and Cowell's Interpreter — the two most authoritative early modern compilations of English legal antiquities. All sources agree on the essential description: an invitation to drink, with charitable contribution expected from guests.
Burrill's entry cross-references the Latin precaria potatoria, which situates bidale within the broader vocabulary of customary obligations and requests — precaria denoting something sought by entreaty rather than compelled by law. This framing is significant: it confirms that bidale contributions were voluntary in theory, though social pressure in small communities would have made refusal difficult.
No substantive divergence exists among the historical sources on the meaning of bidale. The historical dictionaries are consistent but thin — none ventures into the legal consequences of the practice, whether disputes over contributions were cognizable in any court, or how bidale interacted with parish poor relief structures. Modern legal historical scholarship on customary poor relief fills this gap more fully than the dictionary literature alone.
Jurisdictional Note
Bidale is specific to English customary practice and has no documented counterpart in Scots, Welsh, or colonial American law. It is of purely historical relevance and carries no operative legal meaning in any modern jurisdiction.