Definition
A toll historically levied for the right to pass through a forest. Chiminage was a feudal charge imposed on travelers — and sometimes on those with a prescriptive or chartered right of way — who crossed forest land. It was not a license to use the forest for hunting, timber, or other purposes; it was strictly a toll for passage. The equivalent concept in civil law was known as pedagium, a road toll exacted for transit over another's land or through a controlled territory.
Why It Matters in Research
Chiminage is an archaic term of English forest law that will appear almost exclusively in older property records, forest eyres, royal charters, and treatises on common law tenures. Researchers working with medieval land records, manorial surveys, or historical analyses of common rights need to distinguish chiminage from other forest-related rights and burdens — it is a toll paid for passage, not a grant of right to enter, hunt, or gather.
The term is rarely litigated in any modern sense and has no living statutory form. If it appears in a historical source, the surrounding context — forest eyres, royal forest courts, manorial records — will usually confirm the toll-for-passage meaning. Cross-referencing Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 56a) and Spelman's Glossary, cited by Bouvier, will give the most authoritative historical grounding. Cowell's Interpreter is the secondary source most frequently quoted in the dictionary entries and remains a useful reference for obsolete English legal terms of this type.
Researchers should be alert to variant spellings. Historical manuscripts may render the term as chimenage, cheminage, or similar forms reflecting Norman French orthographic conventions. The word does not appear in modern statutory indexes under any standard spelling.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source entries converge on the same definition: a toll for passage through a forest, equated with the civil law pedagium. Black's (1st ed.) adds the dimension of prescriptive or chartered right — suggesting that chiminage could arise either by long usage or by express grant — and attributes the point to Wharton. Black's (2nd ed.) and Bouvier both cite Cowell as primary authority. Bouvier additionally directs the reader to Co. Litt. 56a and Spelman's Glossary, the most substantive secondary references available for this term.
No source disagrees on the core meaning. The only minor divergence is that Black's (1st ed.) frames chiminage in terms of the underlying right of passage (by prescription or charter) and the toll as an incident of that right, while the other entries define it more simply as the toll itself. This is a distinction of framing, not of substance. None of the historical dictionaries address how chiminage was assessed, who collected it, or what enforcement mechanisms existed — researchers needing that operational detail will need to consult forest law treatises and primary records directly.
Webster's 1913 marks the term explicitly as obsolete, confirming that chiminage had passed out of active legal use well before the twentieth century.
Jurisdictional Note
Chiminage is a term of English common law and has no recognized counterpart in American law. It may appear in colonial-era land grants or charters that incorporated English forest law concepts, but such appearances are rare. Civil law jurisdictions used pedagium for the equivalent concept.