Definition
A unit of measure for wool used in old English trade law. One cark was a fixed quantity of wool, and thirty carks constituted one sarplar — a larger unit equivalent to 2,240 pounds in weight. The term appears in English statutory commercial regulation governing the wool trade.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A noxious or corroding worry; the state of being filled with worry.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A noxious or corroding care; solicitude; worry. Marked as archaic. Used by Spenser, Motherwell, and Blackmore in literary contexts.
The legal and common meanings are entirely unrelated. In ordinary English, cark denotes a mental state — anxious, gnawing concern — and carried that sense in poetry and prose from the medieval period onward. In law, cark is a commodity measurement with no emotional content whatsoever. A researcher encountering the word in a legal or commercial document should not import the common meaning; context will almost always resolve the ambiguity, but the divergence is sharp enough to flag.
Why It Matters in Research
Cark is a term of narrow historical specificity. It appears in the context of English wool trade regulation — one of the most heavily legislated commercial sectors of medieval and early modern England — and its relevance is essentially confined to that corpus.
Researchers working with pre-modern English commercial records, customs documents, or trade statutes should note that wool measurement terminology was not consistent across centuries or localities. The cark-to-sarplar ratio (30:1) is the relationship preserved in the statutory source, but records predating or postdating the period of St. 27 Hen. VI may use the term differently or inconsistently. Do not assume the weight relationship holds across all historical periods without verification against the specific document's date and origin.
The term is essentially a dead letter in modern law. It will not appear in contemporary commercial codes, UCC materials, or modern trade regulation. Its research value is purely historical — most likely encountered when tracing the chain of English wool trade statutes, reading medieval merchant records, or analyzing historical weights-and-measures frameworks.
Cross-indexing with related measurement units (sarplar, tod, stone, pack) is essential when working in this area, as these terms formed an interconnected system of wool trade measurement that is rarely documented comprehensively in any single source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary carry identical entries for cark, differing only in minor punctuation. Neither edition adds interpretive commentary beyond the basic definition and the statutory reference to St. 27 Hen. VI, c. 2, confirmed through Jacob's Law Dictionary. The consistency across editions reflects the term's stability as a historical artifact rather than a living legal concept — there was nothing to update because the term never evolved.
Neither Black's edition situates cark within the broader system of English wool measurement or explains how the sarplar-to-cark relationship operated in practice. Researchers should not expect the dictionary entries alone to provide sufficient context for working with primary commercial records; supplementary sources on medieval English weights and measures will be necessary.
No major legal dictionary appears to have expanded on the Black's treatment. The term's obscurity in legal literature reflects its extremely narrow scope of application.
Jurisdictional Note
Cark is an English legal term with no known application in American law. It is relevant only to English statutory and commercial history, specifically within the regulatory framework governing the wool trade in the medieval and early modern periods.