Definition
A medieval English fiscal term denoting a head or poll tax, or the act of paying such a tax. Cafutagium referred both to the levy itself — assessed on each person (or head) within a taxable population — and to the payment or satisfaction of that levy. As a charge calculated per capita rather than on property or income, it belonged to a category of impositions notable for falling equally on all persons subject to it, regardless of individual wealth or landholding.
Common Confusion
Cafutagium is occasionally encountered alongside cognate terms such as capitagium and chevagium, all of which touch on per-capita obligations in medieval English and Norman fiscal practice. These terms are related but not identical. Capitagium is the more widely recorded Latin form for a poll or head tax in the same tradition. Chevagium carried a distinct meaning tied to the annual payment made by a villein or serf to a lord as acknowledgment of personal bondage — a mark of unfree status — rather than a purely fiscal impost on the general population. Researchers encountering any of these terms in medieval records should resist treating them as interchangeable without examining the context of the specific document.
Why It Matters in Research
Cafutagium appears almost exclusively in highly technical medieval and early modern legal sources. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it outside glossaries, Year Book materials, manorial records, or antiquarian compilations. Because the term encompasses both the tax itself and the act of its payment, context is essential: a document recording cafutagium may be evidencing the existence of a levy, a receipt of payment, or a dispute over liability.
The term has narrow temporal and geographic scope. It belongs firmly to the feudal and late-feudal English legal world and has no meaningful modern legal survival. A researcher tracing the history of taxation, villeinage, or manorial obligations may find it useful as a marker of per-capita fiscal burdens distinct from land-based dues such as tallage or scutage. Its appearance in a document can help date the source or signal the nature of the lord-tenant relationship being described.
Because Black's supplements its definition with citations to Cowell and Blount — two seventeenth-century English legal glossarists — researchers should understand that the term was already archaic by the time those works were compiled. Cowell's Interpreter (1607) and Blount's Nomo-Lexikon (1670) were themselves backward-looking glossaries of obsolete and technical terms; their inclusion of cafutagium confirms its antiquity rather than any contemporary legal vitality.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the only significant modern legal dictionary treatment, defining cafutagium concisely as head or poll money, or the payment of it, and directing readers to Cowell and Blount. This economy of treatment reflects the term's narrowness and disuse.
The reliance on Cowell and Blount is itself informative. Both glossarists drew heavily on earlier Norman and Latin sources, and their definitions were written for practitioners and scholars seeking to decode archaic instruments rather than for any ongoing practical use. Blount's Nomo-Lexikon in particular was a compilation of terms that had already passed out of common legal usage by the Restoration period. Researchers should treat definitions from these sources as antiquarian synthesis rather than authoritative contemporary exposition.
No major American legal dictionary treats cafutagium as a living term. Its appearance in Black's supplemental material confirms that it was included for historical completeness — useful when encountered in old English instruments brought before courts or discussed in historical title searches — rather than for any anticipation of recurring modern use.
Jurisdictional Note
Cafutagium is an exclusively English common law term rooted in medieval fiscal and manorial practice. It has no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or civil law traditions.