Definition
Clough carries two distinct meanings in legal and commercial usage:
1. (Topographical) A valley, cleft, or narrow ravine. Used in this sense primarily in land descriptions and boundary surveys, particularly in older English conveyancing and Domesday-derived property records.
2. (Commercial weights) An allowance made for the turn of the scale when purchasing goods wholesale by weight. A small margin granted to the buyer to account for imprecision in weighing — essentially a customary tolerance built into bulk commercial transactions.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Wiktionary treats "clough" primarily as a proper noun — a surname and the name of several small settlements in the British Isles and North America. The common noun sense is not prominently featured in modern general usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A cleft in a hill; a ravine or narrow valley. Also, a sluice used to return water to a channel after depositing sediment on flooded land.
The topographical sense in Webster's aligns closely with the first legal meaning and presents no meaningful gap. The second legal meaning — the commercial weight allowance — has no counterpart in ordinary English usage at any period. A researcher encountering "clough" in a commercial or market-regulation context should not assume the topographical meaning applies.
Common Confusion
The two meanings of clough are contextually distinct but visually identical on the page. In land grant documents and boundary descriptions, clough means a geographical feature. In market records, customs regulations, merchant guild documents, or wholesale trade instruments, clough means a weight allowance. Misreading the topographical sense into a commercial document — or vice versa — will produce an interpretation error. Context is the only guide; the word itself gives no signal.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter clough in two largely separate documentary streams, and conflating them is an easy mistake.
In property and conveyancing records, clough functions as a boundary marker or geographic descriptor. It appears with some frequency in English Domesday-era materials and in later land surveys, particularly in northern England where the word remained in active dialect use. Burrill's citation to Domesday is the key signal: this is medieval English land-description vocabulary that persisted into conveyancing well past its disappearance from general speech.
In commercial and trade regulation records, clough is a term of the marketplace. It reflects the practical reality of pre-precision weighing: bulk goods could not be weighed to exact measure, and a customary allowance was built into the transaction. Researchers working with guild records, market ordinances, customs accounts, or merchant dispute records from early modern England may encounter clough in this sense. The allowance was a term of trade, not a legal right in the modern statutory sense, but it could be the subject of commercial disputes and therefore appears in litigation records.
Neither meaning survived robustly into American legal practice. Researchers working in U.S. sources will rarely encounter clough outside of historical land descriptions in jurisdictions with English colonial roots, and even there it is uncommon. Its primary relevance to Law Mind corpus researchers is in English legal and commercial history materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Burrill are in complete agreement on both definitions, reproducing them in nearly identical language. Burrill adds the Domesday citation for the topographical sense and attributes the commercial meaning to Whishaw's New Law Dictionary — a useful provenance marker indicating that the weight-allowance definition was being drawn from mercantile and commercial law tradition rather than from judicial decisions or statutes.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the weight-allowance meaning implies a broader system of customary market tolerances (tare, tret, clough) that structured early modern wholesale trade. Clough is the least prominent of these allowances and the dictionaries treat it in isolation. Researchers needing to understand the commercial context should look at the full cluster of weight-allowance terminology together.
Jurisdictional Note
Both meanings are essentially English in origin and primary application. The topographical sense may appear in American land records in regions surveyed under English practice, but it is uncommon. The commercial weight-allowance sense has no meaningful American legal application.