Definition
Companagium (also spelled companage) is a medieval Latin legal term referring to food or provisions served as accompaniment to bread — the side dishes, relishes, or victuals eaten alongside the principal bread ration. In feudal and manorial contexts, the term appears in records concerning the provisioning rights and subsistence entitlements of tenants, servants, household members, or laborers, where their allotted food was divided between bread (the primary staple) and companagium (everything else consumed with it).
The term belongs to the vocabulary of manorial law and feudal obligation rather than to any formal doctrine or cause of action. It surfaces chiefly in records of household provisioning, monastic allowances, and the customary duties owed by lords to those within their household or under their maintenance.
Common Confusion
Companagium should not be confused with companatico or similar Romance-language terms appearing in continental legal sources, though these share the same root concept. In an English legal research context, the term is distinct from corrody, which is the broader right to maintenance (including but not limited to food) owed by a monastery or lord to a dependent — companagium describes the content of a food allotment, not the right to maintenance itself.
Why It Matters in Research
Companagium is a term encountered almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal and manorial records — plea rolls, custumals, household accounts, and monastic cartularies — rather than in common law doctrine. Researchers approaching this term should treat it primarily as a records-interpretation problem rather than a doctrinal one.
The critical navigational point: Burrill's entry is skeletal, pointing only to Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum as the substantive authority. Spelman's Glossarium is the foundational reference for Anglo-Latin medieval legal vocabulary of this kind, and researchers encountering companagium in a primary source should go directly to Spelman rather than expecting substantive treatment in standard common law dictionaries.
The term may appear in disputes over manorial custom, in records of corrodies (rights to monastic maintenance), or in provisions fixed by agreement or court order for the support of dependents. When it appears in a legal record, the operative question is usually quantification: what exactly was owed, and whether it was satisfied. The word itself carries no independent legal test or formal doctrine — its significance is descriptive and evidentiary, defining the scope of a provisioning obligation.
Researchers should also be alert to variant spellings in Latin records: companage, companagium, and compenagium all appear, and indexing in digitized manuscript collections may not capture all forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is a bare cross-reference — it defines companagium only by pointing to companage and to Spelman, offering nothing further. This reflects the term's status as historical legal vocabulary rather than active common law doctrine: by the time Burrill compiled his dictionary in the nineteenth century, companagium had no living legal function and was of interest only to antiquarians and historians of feudal tenure.
Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum remains the primary scholarly authority for this class of medieval Latin legal terms. Spelman treats companagium as the food accompaniment to bread, situating it within the broader framework of manorial household provisioning. Later glossaries of medieval Latin, including Du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, provide parallel treatment in the continental European context, confirming that the concept was not uniquely English but shared across feudal Europe under related terminology.
No meaningful divergence exists among the historical sources on the core meaning. The gap, rather, is between the historical dictionaries' bare acknowledgment of the term and the richer context available only in primary records and specialized medieval Latin scholarship.