Definition
An archaic legal term denoting young poles or saplings that, once cut, were fashioned into levers or lifting implements. The term appears in historical English law in the context of woodland rights and timber usage, describing a specific category of cut wood distinguished by its intended function as a tool or mechanical aid rather than fuel or structural timber.
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Why It Matters in Research
COLPICES is a narrow, essentially obsolete term drawn from the vocabulary of English forest law and woodland tenure. Researchers encountering it in historical sources — particularly medieval or early modern English legal documents, manor court rolls, or conveyances touching on timber rights — should understand that it belongs to a specialized lexicon governing what a tenant or licensee could lawfully take from woodland. English law historically distinguished carefully among categories of wood and their permitted uses: estovers (wood for fuel, fencing, or building), browse wood, and implements fashioned from cut saplings each carried different legal implications for who could take them and under what grant.
The practical trap for corpus researchers is that COLPICES appears almost exclusively in secondary glossaries and digest entries rather than in primary legal argument. Its presence in Black's Law Dictionary in both the first and second editions traces directly to Thomas Blount's *Nomo-Lexicon: A Law-Dictionary* (1670), and the definition has been carried forward verbatim without elaboration. This means the term functions in the Law Mind corpus largely as a reference anchor — if you find it, you are likely in a glossary, a Blount-derived reference work, or a document dealing with historical woodland tenure disputes.
Researchers working on estovers, common of estovers, or timber rights more broadly should treat COLPICES as a term that may appear in boundary conditions of older grants: a grantor specifying what kinds of wood a grantee may take would sometimes enumerate categories including poles suitable for levers. Failure to recognize the term could cause a researcher to misread the scope of a woodland right being conveyed or disputed.
There is no meaningful modern usage of COLPICES in American law. The term has no statutory foothold in U.S. jurisdictions and would appear in American legal research only in historical or comparative contexts.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary reproduce the same single-sentence definition, citing Blount directly and without independent elaboration. This verbatim replication across editions signals that no additional legal development of the term occurred between the two publications; Black's was simply preserving Blount's gloss for completeness.
Thomas Blount's *Nomo-Lexicon* (1670) is the apparent origin point for COLPICES as a legal term of art, and Blount himself was cataloguing archaic and technical vocabulary that was already receding from active use in his own era. The historical dictionaries thus offer no divergence to resolve — they agree because they share a single source — and they offer no case law, statutory reference, or doctrinal context to enrich the definition beyond its descriptive core.
What the historical sources do not address: the precise legal consequences of taking colpices without right, how the term interacted with specific forms of woodland tenure, or whether it appeared as a term of distinction in actual pleadings. Researchers needing that depth must move beyond Black's and Blount to primary forest law sources such as Manwood's *Treatise of the Forest Laws* (1598) or Coke's treatment of estovers in the *Institutes*.
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