BLADARIUS

Definition

A medieval English legal term for a dealer in grain or corn. The bladarius was a trader who bought and sold corn, meal, or grain — equivalent to what later English usage would call a corn-monger, meal-man, or corn-chandler. The term also carried the specific sense of an engrosser of corn or grain: a person who bought up large quantities of a staple commodity in order to resell at profit, a practice historically viewed with suspicion and subject to legal regulation.

Common Language

This is a term of pure legal and historical Latin with no surviving common English counterpart. The closest ordinary English approximations — corn-dealer, grain merchant — carry none of the regulatory and pejorative weight the term bore in medieval and early modern law. The engrosser sense in particular implies conduct that was legally actionable, not merely commercial.

Why It Matters in Research

Bladarius appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with medieval English economic regulation — the assize of bread and ale, statutes against forestalling, regrating, and engrossing, and early common law materials governing the grain trade. Researchers encountering this term in historical sources should recognize that it straddles two meanings: the neutral (a grain trader by occupation) and the regulatory (an engrosser whose conduct was potentially criminal or subject to fine). The context of the source will usually indicate which sense is operative, but the distinction matters for understanding whether a given legal record is describing a party's trade or their offense. The term is Latin in form and will appear in Year Books, plea rolls, and early treatise literature in that form. It will not appear in modern case law. Burrill's citation to 2 Inst. 81 — Coke's Institutes — places it within the mainstream of early English legal learning on trade regulation, and researchers tracing the history of engrossing as an offense will find bladarius a useful indexing term when working through that literature.

Historical Dictionary Support

Black's (both editions) and Burrill's agree closely on the definition: corn-monger, meal-man, corn-chandler, bladier, or engrosser of grain. All three cite Blount's Nomo-Lexicon, the seventeenth-century law dictionary that was a primary vehicle for preserving archaic legal Latin terms. Burrill adds the derivation from blada or bladum (corn, grain in medieval Latin) and the Coke citation, making it the most useful of the three entries for a researcher seeking to locate the term in primary sources. None of the historical dictionaries develops the regulatory dimension in depth. The engrosser sense — legally significant because engrossing corn was a common-law misdemeanor, later codified and eventually abolished — is noted but not explained. Researchers should not rely on the dictionary entries alone for the legal treatment of engrossing; they require supplementary reading in the assize literature and the statutes against forestalling and regrating.

Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Forestalling, Regrating, and Engrossing; Assize of Bread and Ale; Medieval English Trade Regulation.

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