Definition
An assessment or tax. Cessment is an archaic term denoting a levy imposed upon persons or property, equivalent in meaning to what modern law calls an assessment or tax. It appears in older English legal texts and statutes as a shorthand for compulsory fiscal impositions, without distinction between the various forms of taxation now recognized in law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An assessment or tax. Marked as obsolete.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "An assessment or tax. [Obs.] Johnson."
The common and legal meanings are identical and both sources mark the term as obsolete. The practical gap for a researcher is not between common and legal usage but between the term's historical currency and its near-total absence from modern legal discourse. A reader encountering cessment in a historical text should treat it as a straightforward synonym for assessment or tax, not as a term of art carrying special technical weight.
Why It Matters in Research
Cessment is a term that belongs almost exclusively to pre-modern English legal sources. Researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus — particularly documents predating the nineteenth century — may encounter it in fiscal records, parliamentary materials, local government instruments, and treatises on public revenue without any contextual gloss. Several navigational points are worth flagging.
First, the term carries no technical precision of its own. It does not distinguish between a general tax and a special assessment on benefited property, a distinction that became legally significant in later American and English law. When cessment appears in a historical source, the researcher must look to context to determine what kind of imposition is meant.
Second, the word's obsolescence creates an indexing trap. Searches for "tax" or "assessment" in historical corpora will not reliably return documents using cessment, and vice versa. Researchers building search strategies around fiscal and revenue topics in older materials should include cessment as an explicit search term.
Third, cessment has no recognized statutory survival in modern American or English law. It will not appear in contemporary codes, regulations, or case reporters. If it surfaces in a modern document, treat it as either a direct quotation from an older source or an affectation, and look for a controlling modern equivalent.
Fourth, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry bundles cessment with cessor and cestui que trust in a single alphabetical run, which reflects the compressed treatment common to nineteenth-century practitioner dictionaries. Researchers using that source should be careful not to conflate the entries.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Rapalje & Lawrence — agree completely: cessment means an assessment or tax, and nothing more. There is no divergence among the dictionaries on meaning, scope, or application. This uniformity itself is informative: the term never acquired technical elaboration or contested meaning in the legal literature. It was used, recognized, and then allowed to fall away without dispute.
Webster's 1913 confirms that by the early nineteenth century the word was already considered obsolete in ordinary English, attributing it to Johnson's dictionary. The legal dictionaries carry it forward not because it remained in active use but because legal texts have a longer half-life than general prose, and practitioners needed to decode older instruments.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: none of the sources explains whether cessment was ever used with the more specific meaning that assessment later acquired — particularly the sense of a charge on property specially benefited by a public improvement. The silence suggests it was not so used, but researchers working with local fiscal records should not assume the term excluded that meaning without examining the surrounding context.
Jurisdictional Note
Cessment appears in English legal sources and was carried into early American usage through reception of English law. It has no recognized jurisdiction-specific meaning in any American state and does not appear in modern statutes or codes on either side of the Atlantic. Jurisdictional variation is not a meaningful research concern for this term.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia: Taxation and Public Revenue; Assessment (Special and General)