Definition
In old English law, companage (also spelled companagium) refers to all food eaten alongside bread — that is, any victuals or provisions other than bread and drink. The term functioned as a category of sustenance in feudal and manorial contexts, typically used to describe food components of subsistence allowances, household provisions, or customary entitlements owed to servants, laborers, or ecclesiastical dependents.
The scope is precise: bread and drink occupied their own conceptual categories in medieval provisioning; companage filled the space between them, covering meat, fish, pottage, cheese, and similar edibles that accompanied the staple loaf.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern usage. The term has no living presence in ordinary English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered. The term was already archaic by the nineteenth century and appears to have passed directly from medieval legal and ecclesiastical Latin into historical legal dictionaries without ever achieving broad vernacular circulation.
Editorial note: Companage has no meaningful common-language counterpart against which to measure legal drift. Its absence from Webster's 1913 itself tells the researcher something: by the time modern English legal vocabulary was being codified, this term was already a relic preserved chiefly in glossaries and antiquarian scholarship.
Why It Matters in Research
Companage surfaces almost exclusively in two research contexts: medieval manorial records and ecclesiastical documents concerning household or monastic provisioning, and the historical legal dictionaries that attempted to recover and explain that vocabulary.
Researchers working in early English legal history should note that the term appears in source texts as companagium, the Latinized form, rather than the anglicized companage. Searching only the English spelling will miss most primary material. Burrill preserves the Latin and gives the clearest structural definition (quicquid cibi cum pane sumitur — whatever food is taken with bread), which is more useful for parsing period documents than Black's compressed entry.
The term matters less as an operative legal concept than as a unit of analysis in interpreting allowances, household accounts, or customary obligations. When a manorial record, a monastic rule, or a feudal grant specifies provisioning obligations, understanding that companage denotes the non-bread, non-drink portion of a food entitlement helps the researcher identify what was and was not included in a given allotment.
Traps in historical sources: The distinction between bread, drink, and companage was not always observed consistently in non-legal texts. Lay household accounts may use the term loosely or omit it entirely in favor of itemized lists. The legal definition as preserved in Spelman and Cowell reflects the tidiest version of a concept that was messier in practice.
Corpus connection: Researchers following references to manorial customary rights, villeinage, or ecclesiastical household management will encounter companage as a satellite term to broader provisioning frameworks. It rarely travels alone — look for it alongside bread-corn, livery, and similar categories of customary food renders.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in close agreement, all tracing to Spelman's Glossarium (the standard authority for medieval English legal Latin). Burrill's entry is the most substantive, citing both Cowell's Interpreter and Spelman and reproducing the Latin definition that the other dictionaries collapse into paraphrase. Black's first and second editions offer identical compressed entries that are adequate for identification but insufficient for research purposes without consulting Burrill for the etymological structure.
All three sources correctly note the exclusion of bread and drink from the term's scope, which is the operationally important detail. None of the entries situate companage within a broader framework of feudal provisioning or explain the contexts in which the term would have appeared in actual documents — a gap that researchers must fill from Spelman directly or from secondary scholarship on medieval household and manorial administration.
What historical sources miss: The dictionaries treat companage as a static definitional entry rather than tracing its use across different institutional contexts (manorial, monastic, royal household). That contextual variation is not captured here and would require primary source research.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Manorial System; Feudal Tenure and Customary Rights; Ecclesiastical Household Administration