Definition
In Roman civil law, caupones (singular: caupo) were innkeepers — persons who kept a tavern or lodging house for travelers. The term carried a specific legal weight beyond mere occupation: under Roman law, caupones were subject to a particular set of obligations and liabilities regarding the safety of goods entrusted to them by guests. The praetorian edict imposed strict liability on caupones (alongside nautae, shipowners, and stabularii, stable-keepers) for loss or damage to a traveler's property while on their premises, regardless of fault. This made the caupo legally answerable not only for his own acts but for those of his servants and others in his establishment.
Common Confusion
The second edition of Black's Law Dictionary places the entry for CAURSINES — Italian money-lenders expelled from England under Henry III for usury — immediately following CAUPONES. The proximity of these two unrelated entries in alphabetically organized historical dictionaries has occasionally caused confusion in transcription and indexing. Caupones and caursines share no legal relationship; the adjacency is purely alphabetical.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering caupones in historical legal texts are almost certainly reading a source grounded in Roman or civil law, and the term signals a specific liability regime — not merely a description of an occupation. The practical importance lies in the receptum nautarum cauponum stabulariorum, the praetorian action that held this class of persons to near-absolute accountability for guest property. Understanding caupones as a legal category, rather than simply a Latin word for innkeeper, is essential to tracing the doctrinal ancestry of common law innkeeper liability and bailment law.
The Digest titles cited in all three dictionary sources — Digest 4.9 and 47.5 — are the primary Roman law texts governing this liability. Story's Agency section 458, also consistently cited, connects the Roman framework to nineteenth-century American and English agency and bailment doctrine, making it a useful bridge source for researchers working in that transitional period.
Because the term appears almost exclusively in civil law contexts, it will surface in sources drawing on Roman law foundations: treatises on maritime law, innkeeper liability, bailment, and agency from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will rarely appear in purely common law case reports. Researchers using Law Mind sources should treat caupones as a doctrinal marker pointing toward the civil law shelf rather than case law reporters.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Burrill's are in complete agreement: caupones means innkeepers in the civil law, with identical citations to Digest 4.9 and 47.5 and to Story on Agency. Burrill adds the Latin grammatical note — plural of caupo — which is useful when the singular form appears in primary sources.
None of the three historical dictionary entries elaborate on the liability doctrine attached to the term. They record the meaning but not the legal consequence, which is the more significant matter for a researcher. The full picture requires going to the Digest titles cited or to Story's treatment directly. Historical dictionaries here function as identification tools, not substantive explanations.
Jurisdictional Note
Caupones is a term of Roman civil law with no direct counterpart in English common law terminology. Its doctrinal legacy — innkeeper strict liability for guest property — was absorbed into common law under different vocabulary, and the Latin term itself appears in American and English legal literature primarily in treatises and scholarly commentary rather than in judicial opinions.