BOTHAGIUM - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

BOTHAGIUMAuthored

The Law Mind • 805 words

Definition

Bothagium (also rendered "boothage") is a customary due or toll paid to the lord of a manor in exchange for the right to pitch and maintain a booth or stall within a market or fair held on the manor's grounds. The payment entitled the trader or vendor to occupy a fixed standing place during the market or fair for the duration of the event. The lord's entitlement to collect bothagium derived from his manorial jurisdiction over the market, which typically required a royal grant or prescriptive right to hold such a gathering in the first place.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The word has no current common usage.

Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term does not appear in general English dictionaries of any period.

Bothagium is pure legal and antiquarian vocabulary. It survives almost exclusively in old manorial records, glossaries of feudal tenure, and secondary works on parish antiquities. Researchers will not encounter it in ordinary historical prose.

Why It Matters in Research

Bothagium is a term of manorial economic history more than of legal doctrine. Researchers are most likely to encounter it when working through records of manorial courts, extents, customals, or surveys that enumerate the various dues and perquisites belonging to a lord. Several practical points deserve attention.

First, the term appears inconsistently across manuscript and printed sources. Variant spellings — boothage, bothage, bothagium — are all in circulation, and a search limited to one form will miss instances of the others. Historical record transcriptions are not always consistent in how they render the Latin or the anglicized form.

Second, Burrill's entry relies on Kennett's Parochial Antiquities (1695), a work of local and ecclesiastical history rather than a law book. This signals that bothagium, while legal in character (it is a property right enforceable in the lord's court), is documented primarily in antiquarian literature rather than in Year Books or formal legal treatises. Researchers should look to manorial history collections, county histories, and published customals as primary finding aids, not to standard common law reporters.

Third, bothagium connects directly to the broader cluster of market tolls and manorial market rights. The lord's right to collect it was inseparable from the right to hold a market at all. Disputes about bothagium would therefore surface in the same contexts as disputes about tolls (thelonium), stallage, piccage, and kindred market dues — all of which could be litigated as franchises in the common law courts. Researchers working on market franchise litigation should check whether bothagium-related claims appear alongside or within those proceedings.

Fourth, by the nineteenth century, manorial market rights were being extinguished or commuted across England. Any corpus material from the Victorian period dealing with manorial enfranchisement or market reform may reference the abolition or commutation of dues including boothage without using the Latin term.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only legal dictionary treatment identified among the shelf sources. The entry is brief and derives its authority entirely from Cowell (John Cowell's Interpreter, various editions from 1607 onward), who in turn cites Kennett's Parochial Antiquities. This chain of citation — Kennett to Cowell to Burrill — is characteristic of how highly specialized manorial terms were transmitted through legal lexicography: each compiler relying on the one before, with no independent verification from court records.

The truncation visible in the source text (the entry runs into what appears to be a definition of bottomry) suggests that Burrill's treatment of bothagium was never extensive. No diverging definitions appear across the historical dictionary record because the term appears in so few sources. Spelman's Glossarium and similar antiquarian glossaries of feudal Latin would be the natural next stop for researchers seeking additional historical depth beyond Burrill and Cowell.

Jurisdictional Note

Bothagium is an English manorial term with no recognized counterpart in Scots law, Irish brehon law, or American law. Researchers working in colonial American materials may encounter it only in the rarest circumstances where English manorial forms were transplanted, which was uncommon outside certain proprietary grants.

BOTHAGIUMmain

Burrill's Law Dictionary • 1867

L. Lat. [from botha, q. v.] In old records. Boothage, or customary dues paid to the lord of the manor, for the pitching and standing of booths in a market or fair. Kennett's Par. Ant. 680, cited in Cowell. owner of a ship, or [the master as] his agent, whereby, in consideration of a sum of money advanced for the use of the ship, the borrower undertakes to repay the same with interest, if the ship terminate her voyage successfully, and binds or hypothecates the ship for the performance of his contract. Smith's Merc. Law, 261. The instrument by which this is effected is usually in the shape of a bond, called a bottomry bond, which is in the nature of a mortgage of the vessel, and is defined by Mr. Justice Story to be "a contract for a loan of money on the bottom of the ship, at an extraordinary interest, upon maritime risks, to be borne by the lender, for a voyage, or for a definite period." 2 Sumner's R. 157, 186. Smith's Merc. Law, ub. sup. 3 Kent's Com. 354. The money is loaned upon the ship, or ship and accruing freight, at an extraordinary interest, the risks of the voyage being borne by the lender, and the bond covers the freight of the voyage, or during the limited time. 3 Kent's Com. 354. Ü. S. Digest, Bottomry and Respondentia. 2 Cond. Rep. U. S. 129, note. Bottomry is a contract of a peculiar character, differing essentially from an ordinary loan. 1 Curtis' R. 340, 349. * **The term bottomry is thought to be of Dutch origin, (being termed in that language bomerie, bodmerie, boddemerie,) and to be derived from boden, or bodem, which in the same language signifies the bottom or keel of a ship. P. Cyclopædia. So bodo, or bodun signified, it is said, in old French and British, a bottom or depth. Camden's Brit. 149. Loccenius de Jur. Mar. lib. 2, c. 6, § 1. Molloy de Jur. Marit. 359. It seems sufficient, however, to derive it, as an English word, from the bottom of a vessel, which is now used by a common figure, (pars pro toto,) as keel, (carina,) was anciently, for the vessel itself. See Bottomage. In some of the books, the word appears in the singular form of bottom2 Vern. 269. Id. 595. BOTHNA, Buthna, Bothena. L. Lat. In old Scotch law. A park where cattle are fed and enclosed. Skene de Verb. Sign. citing Reg. Majest. lib. 4, c. si quis namos, 30.