Definition
A caroome was a license issued by the Lord Mayor of London authorizing the holder to keep a cart. The term belongs to the administrative and regulatory law of the City of London and has no modern equivalent or practical application in contemporary legal practice. It represents an early form of municipal licensing for commercial transport within the City.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A licence once issued to grant the right to keep a cart in the City of London.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not defined. The term does not appear in Webster's 1913, reflecting its narrow legal and geographical specificity.
The common and legal meanings here are essentially identical — the term was never in general use outside the legal and administrative context of the City of London. No meaningful gap exists between common and legal meaning because the word never migrated into ordinary English.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter caroome in historical English legal sources dealing with municipal governance of the City of London, trade regulation, or the administrative authority of the Lord Mayor. The term will appear primarily in older English records — guild documents, mayoral rolls, and municipal ordinances — rather than in case law or statute.
Two research traps deserve attention. First, do not conflate caroome with cargo: the first edition of Black's Law Dictionary presents both terms in close proximity, and the typographical and contextual bleed between the caroome entry and adjacent cargo material is apparent in the source text. Any researcher working from that edition should treat the combined text with care and verify which definition governs the passage they are reading. Second, because this term has no modern statutory or common law life, encountering it in historical sources signals that the document likely predates systematic transport licensing regimes and reflects the Lord Mayor's older quasi-feudal regulatory authority over commerce within the City.
The term is of minimal relevance to American legal research. It appears in Black's exclusively as a point of English legal history and comparative reference, not as a living concept that crossed the Atlantic.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary agree on the core definition: a caroome is a license by the Lord Mayor of London to keep a cart. The two editions are consistent, with the second edition presenting a cleaner, stripped-down entry that omits the surrounding cargo material that cluttered the first edition's entry.
The first edition's text is notable for what it reveals about the hazards of early legal dictionary production. The caroome entry bleeds into material plainly belonging to the adjacent cargo entry — including references to Massachusetts cases and a discussion of a vessel's carrying capacity — suggesting a typesetting or editorial error in that edition. Black's second edition corrects this by presenting only the caroome definition. Historical sources outside Black's, including English municipal and guild records, would be the primary archival material for any serious investigation of how caroomes were issued, regulated, and enforced. Neither edition offers depth on the licensing procedure, the penalties for keeping an unlicensed cart, or the duration or transferability of a caroome.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the historic administrative law of the City of London. It has no recognized equivalent or application in any American, Commonwealth, or civil law jurisdiction. Researchers working in English municipal history prior to the nineteenth-century reform era may encounter it; all others are unlikely to need it.