Definition
An ancient English royal duty or privilege entitling the king's butler to take a portion — or later, a money payment — from every cask or tun of wine imported into England by alien (foreign) merchants. The exaction operated as a form of prerogative revenue attached to the office of the royal butler, functioning either as a physical levy (a quantity of wine taken in kind) or as a customs-style toll assessed on imported wine.
Butlerage belongs to the category of archaic crown prerogatives tied to household offices, and is of purely historical significance. No modern legal system retains or recognizes the duty.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "A duty formerly paid to the king's butler on every ton of wine imported into England by foreign merchants."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A duty of two shillings on every tun of wine imported into England by merchant strangers; — so called because paid to the king's butler for the king."
The common and legal meanings here are substantially aligned — both describe the same revenue mechanism. The narrow distinction worth noting is that legal sources emphasize the original form of the exaction as a physical taking (prisage — a quantity of wine seized in kind), which only later crystallized into a fixed money payment. The common definitions, by presenting it as a straightforward duty of two shillings, reflect the later monetized form and obscure the earlier, more intrusive practice of wine seizure.
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Common Confusion
BUTLERAGE and PRISAGE are closely related and sometimes used interchangeably in historical sources, but they are technically distinguishable. Prisage refers to the older, broader royal prerogative of taking a portion of imported wine as an in-kind levy — applicable to all merchants, not only aliens. Butlerage emerged as the alien-specific counterpart, assessed on wine brought in by foreign merchants, and was administered through the office of the king's butler. Burrill identifies butlerage as originally called prisage, reflecting the historical overlap, but by the period covered in Blackstone and Coke, the terms had acquired separate technical meanings. Researchers encountering either term in historical texts should examine context carefully to determine which form of levy is meant.
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Why It Matters in Research
Butlerage is a navigational term for researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal history, particularly in records touching royal prerogative, customs law, and the governance of alien merchants.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the alien-merchant limitation is significant. Butlerage applied specifically to wine imported by foreign nationals. English denizens importing wine were subject to prisage, not butlerage. Conflating the two in documentary research can produce errors in tracing which merchants bore which burdens — relevant to scholarship on medieval trade regulation and the legal status of alien merchants in England.
Second, the term appears in close proximity to BUTLER'S ORDINANCE in Black's 2nd Edition. These are distinct instruments. The Butler's Ordinance was a purported rule concerning waste by heirs during the ancestor's lifetime, noted in the parliament book of Edward II but never enacted as a statute. Researchers must not conflate the two entries; their proximity in alphabetical dictionaries has occasionally produced confusion in secondary literature.
Third, butlerage appears in records of the English Exchequer, port books, and accounts of the king's household officers. Researchers using these primary sources should understand that butlerage was an incident of office — vested in the butler as a heritable or appointive perquisite — rather than a general customs duty administered through ordinary revenue machinery. This affects how it is recorded and where traces of it appear in the archival record.
Fourth, Bouvier's entry references 2 Bulstrode 254, which places the term in early seventeenth-century English case law. Researchers tracing the judicial history of prerogative duties over wine imports should examine that source directly for period-specific treatment.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in close agreement on the core meaning but differ in emphasis and depth.
Black's (both editions) defines butlerage as a privilege — framing it as a benefit of office rather than a tax — and specifies the alien-merchant limitation without elaborating on the earlier prisage connection.
Bouvier adds the explicit identification with prisage and supplies the Bulstrode citation, providing the only traceable primary source reference among the shelf dictionaries. Bouvier's entry also hints at a broader historical scope ("anciently, it might be taken also of wine im—"), though the text is truncated. This suggests butlerage or its prisage predecessor may have applied more broadly before being confined to alien merchants.
Burrill is the most historically precise of the group, identifying butlerage as "a very ancient hereditary duty belonging to the crown, at first called prisage" — which correctly captures the evolutionary relationship between the two terms and the crown's proprietary character of the right.
Webster's 1913, drawing on Blackstone, provides the monetized two-shilling figure, which reflects the later statutory or customary valuation of what had originally been a taking in kind.
None of the historical sources provide substantive discussion of when butlerage was abolished or fell into disuse, nor do they address the administrative machinery by which it was collected. Researchers seeking that history must look beyond the dictionary shelf.
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Jurisdictional Note
Butlerage was an exclusively English institution tied to the English crown and its prerogative over foreign trade. It has no counterpart in Scots law, Irish law, or any colonial legal system. The term is without operative significance outside historical research into English law.
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