CHISEMENT - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

CHISEMENTAuthored

The Law Mind • 696 words

Definition

Chisement is an archaic legal term referring to the right or custom of taking small quantities of grain or other provisions as a toll or due — typically by a miller or other officer — in exchange for a service rendered, such as grinding corn. It denotes a toll in kind: payment extracted not in money but in a portion of the very commodity being processed or conveyed.

The term appears primarily in feudal and manorial contexts, where customary dues of this nature were embedded in the obligations running between lord, tenant, and tradesperson. Chisement was one of several toll-in-kind arrangements that characterized the agrarian economy of medieval England and its legal order.

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Why It Matters in Research

Chisement is a term almost entirely confined to historical legal sources and will rarely if ever appear in modern statutory or case law. Researchers are most likely to encounter it when working through manorial records, feudal tenure documents, early common law treatises, or annotated editions of Domesday-adjacent material.

The primary trap is conflation with neighboring concepts. Chisement sits within a dense cluster of feudal toll and customary-due terminology — multure, boonwork, tallage, toll-corn — and historical sources do not always use these terms consistently. A researcher finding the term in a primary source should treat it as pointing to a category of in-kind customary obligation rather than assuming a precise and uniform legal content.

Bouvier's treatment connects chisement functionally to questions of expulsion and banishment, which may reflect an edition-specific organizational choice or a cross-reference artifact rather than a substantive doctrinal link. Researchers using Bouvier as a finding tool should be alert to this: the surrounding entries in a dictionary do not always bear on the term itself, and Bouvier's alphabetical proximity to expulsion-related entries does not imply that chisement carries any forced-removal meaning.

For corpus researchers, this term is a signal to look laterally: if chisement appears in a document, that document almost certainly belongs to a manorial, feudal tenure, or early common law context. It is a useful dating and classification marker even when its precise legal content is ambiguous.

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Historical Dictionary Support

Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the primary historical legal dictionary source available for this term, and its entry is limited. The Bouvier text provided in the source material pivots quickly into a discussion of expulsion, banishment, and extradition — a discussion that does not bear directly on chisement as a toll-in-kind concept. This suggests either an editorial anomaly in the edition indexed or a broader entry structure in which chisement appears as a sub-entry or cross-reference point rather than a freestanding definition.

Rapalje & Lawrence, also appearing in the source material, addresses enfranchisement rather than chisement — a terminological neighbor, not the term itself.

The absence of a robust historical dictionary treatment is itself informative. Terms of this kind — highly localized, feudal, and obsolete before the main era of systematic legal lexicography — were frequently underdefined or omitted by nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries, which had limited occasion to address the granular vocabulary of English manorial custom. English sources, particularly Jacob's Law Dictionary and Termes de la Ley in its various editions, are likely to yield richer treatment than American compilations.

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Jurisdictional Note

Chisement is a term of English manorial and common law origin with no known reception into American, Canadian, or other common law jurisdictions as an operative legal concept. It is relevant almost exclusively to English legal history research and to the interpretation of historical documents drawn from the feudal period.

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CHISEMENTmain

Bouvier's Law Dictionary • 1928

Distinguished from Banishment, Extradition. Expulsion constitutes neither banishment nor extradition. Those who have been banished are, like those who are expelled, forced to leave the country; but whereas those who are subjected to banishment are compelled to depart only when lawfully convicted of a crime which entails banishment as its penalty, those who are expelled are subject to deportation on being served with an official order to that effect. The Government, on the one hand, issues the order of expulsion (deportation) in due course and at its dis- cretion without any preliminary under- standing with the state of which the party expelled is a national; and on the other hand, the grounds of expulsion need not be set out in the order, for, on principle, the Govern- ment is the sole judge as to the necessity to deport. This absence of prior entente with the state to which the deportee belongs results in expulsion being a unilateral act, differing essentially thereby from extradition, with which expulsion is at times confused. Extradition presupposes a prior under- standing between states as a matter of course it constitutes a bilateral act in the form of a convention agreed upon between two states. When a state extradites a person, or in other words delivers up an individual accused of crime, or who has actually been found guilty of an ofiense committed out- side of its jurisdiction and against the laws of the state which is seeking to have him extradited and which has the right to deter- mine and to punish his guilt, this is done by force of prior treaties or by virtue of a special agreement between states. When, on the other hand, a state expels, . it is not because it is under any obligation to do so based on a contract with another state. (Alexis Martiné, l'Expulsion des Étrangers, pp. 5, 6.) Bouvé, Exclusion and Expulsion of Aliens in the United States, p. 6. See DEPORTATION; EXTRADITION: RENVOI.