Definition
Caursines (also spelled caorcini, caursini, or corsini) were Italian merchants — believed to be Lombards — who came to England during the reign of Henry III (1216–1272) and established themselves as moneylenders. They were eventually expelled from England on account of their usurious and extortionate lending practices. The term appears in historical legal sources as a label for this particular class of foreign commercial usurers operating in medieval England, distinct from domestic creditors and from later recognized groups such as the Jews, who were subject to their own separate body of medieval English law.
Common Confusion
Caursines are sometimes conflated with the broader category of "Lombards," the Italian merchant-bankers who played a significant role in medieval European finance. Burrill notes the probable connection, suggesting the Caursines derived their name from a town in Lombardy. However, the terms are not interchangeable in historical legal sources: "Lombard" persisted as a general descriptor for Italian moneylenders in England well beyond the period associated with the Caursines, while "Caursines" refers specifically to the group active under Henry III and subsequently expelled. Researchers should treat the terms as overlapping but distinct.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a historical term with no living legal application. Its relevance is confined to research in medieval English legal and commercial history, the history of usury law, and the legal treatment of foreign merchants in pre-modern England.
Researchers working in this area should be aware of several navigational considerations. First, spelling is highly unstable across sources. The Latin forms caorcini, caursini, and corsini all appear, and English-language sources render the term variously as Caursines, Caorsines, and Causines. A search strategy relying on any single spelling will miss a significant portion of the relevant corpus. Second, the Caursines appear in sources primarily as a cautionary or illustrative example within discussions of usury, not as a subject of extended legal doctrine in their own right. Researchers tracing the development of English usury law — from canonical prohibition through the Statute of Usury (1571) and beyond — may encounter this term as background context rather than as the doctrinal focus. Third, the expulsion of the Caursines sits alongside other medieval episodes of expulsion and legal marginalization of foreign financial actors, including the eventual expulsion of English Jews in 1290. Corpus researchers should be alert to the way legal writers have historically used the Caursines as a rhetorical foil — evidence of the dangers of unregulated foreign usury — rather than as a precise legal category with defined elements. Fourth, the reference in Black's to "Co. Litt. 341" in close proximity to the Caursines entry is an artifact of the dictionary's typographic layout and refers to a separate maxim (Causa et origo est materia negotii), not to a Coke authority on Caursines themselves. Researchers should not treat this as a citation supporting the Caursines definition.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three dictionary sources agree on the core facts: Italian merchants, reign of Henry III, moneylending, expulsion for usury and extortion. The sources each trace back to the same small cluster of antiquarian authorities — Cowell's Interpreter, Blount's Nomo-Lexicon, and Spelman's Glossarium — with Burrill adding a reference to Matthew Paris as cited in Spelman. This tight genealogy means the dictionaries are not independent sources; they are all drawing from the same seventeenth-century antiquarian tradition, which itself was working from medieval chronicles. No dictionary entry provides a legal definition in any technical sense — there is no statute, writ, or doctrine attached to the term. Burrill is the most complete of the three, identifying the probable Lombard origin and providing the Latin variant spellings. Black's (both editions) gives the same core text with minor variation. None of the historical dictionaries situates the Caursines within a broader analysis of medieval alien merchant law or the lex mercatoria, which limits their utility for structural legal-historical research.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to medieval English legal history. It has no recognized equivalent or application in Scots law, continental legal traditions, or American law.