Definition
Conge (from the French, meaning permission or leave) is a term appearing in historical Anglo-American and French law with two principal meanings:
1. In French maritime law: a passport, clearance, or official license permitting a vessel to arm, equip, or navigate. The conge functioned as governmental authorization to sail, analogous to modern vessel documentation or clearance papers issued by port authorities.
2. In English common law procedure: a formal leave or permission granted by a court, most commonly appearing in the compound forms below. The term is almost never encountered alone in English legal texts; its legal life is primarily carried by its derivative phrases.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Listed as an alternative form of congy or congius, ancient Roman units of liquid measure and mass — a definition entirely unrelated to legal usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To take leave with the customary civilities; to bow or courtesy." Webster's reflects the term's survival in polite social English, where to "give conge" meant to formally dismiss someone or to take ceremonious leave.
The gap between these common meanings and the legal meaning is significant and could mislead a researcher. Both the social sense (a bow of dismissal) and the Roman unit sense bear no relation to the procedural and maritime permissions the term describes in legal sources. The social sense does share a root concept — leave-taking — but the legal meaning is always a formal grant of permission by authority, not a personal gesture of farewell.
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Common Confusion
Researchers sometimes encounter conge in isolation in older English and French legal texts and mistake it for a generic term. In practice, the word almost never appears unmodified in English common law materials; the operative terms are always the compound forms (conge d'accorder, conge d'emparler). Treating conge alone as carrying procedural weight — rather than as the head of a compound phrase — will produce a misreading of the source.
Conge d'emparler and imparlance are closely related but distinct: conge d'emparler is the leave granted; imparlance (licentia loquendi) is the procedural device itself. Black's and Bouvier's sometimes use the terms interchangeably, which can obscure this distinction in historical sources.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
CONGE D'ACCORDER (leave to accord): In the old common law process of levying a fine — a method of conveying title to real property through a collusive action — the defendant, upon delivery of the original writ, was entitled to seek a conge d'accorder, meaning formal leave of the court to agree with the plaintiff. This permission was a procedural formality enabling the parties to proceed toward the final concord (the fine itself). The equivalent Latin phrase is licentia concordandi.
CONGE D'EMPARLER (leave to imparl): The privilege of an imparlance — that is, leave granted by the court for a defendant to have further time to deliberate before answering. The equivalent Latin phrase is licentia loquendi (leave to speak). This form appears in Blackstone's treatment of pleading practice.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs predominantly to the historical layer of the Law Mind corpus. Researchers will encounter conge almost exclusively in:
- Pre-19th century English pleading treatises and reports dealing with the fine and recovery system of real property conveyance — a system abolished in England by the Fines and Recoveries Act 1833 and that had no significant life in most American jurisdictions.
- French and civil law maritime materials, where the clearance/passport sense remains relevant to understanding historical vessel licensing and admiralty practice.
The key navigational trap: because the fine-levying procedure was a legal fiction using collusive litigation, the records and treatises discussing conge d'accorder are dense and procedurally archaic. Researchers approaching these materials for property law history need to understand that the "agreement" being licensed was itself a fictitious concord, not a genuine dispute settlement.
Jurisdictional variation matters here. The compound forms of conge reflect English common law procedure that was received unevenly in American jurisdictions. American sources on levying fines are sparse and vary by colony and early state; a researcher should not assume that English procedural formalities — including the formal request for conge d'accorder — were uniformly replicated in American practice.
For the maritime sense, conge appears in French civil law sources and in admiralty contexts touching French colonial or continental European shipping. It is essentially absent from American maritime law as an operative term, though it may appear descriptively in historical accounts of port clearance procedures.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Black's second edition are in agreement on the core meanings. Both recognize the French maritime sense (passport/clearance for navigation) and the English procedural compounds. Bouvier gives slightly more texture to conge d'accorder by directing the reader to Termes de la Ley and Cowel — useful for researchers tracing the term into its earliest English legal dictionary treatments. Black's adds the licentia loquendi equivalence for conge d'emparler with a Blackstone reference (3 Bl. Comm. 299), which is the most useful anchor for that form.
Neither dictionary fully contextualizes how archaic these terms were even at the time of their compilation. By the time Black's second edition appeared (1910), the fine-levying system had been dead in England for nearly eighty years, and the compound forms of conge were already purely historical curiosities in English and American legal practice. The entries read as fossils preserved for completeness rather than living procedural terms — a fact the dictionaries do not flag.
The maritime sense had more practical longevity in French and civil law systems, but neither Bouvier nor Black's develops this dimension with much depth.
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Jurisdictional Note
The English procedural forms (conge d'accorder, conge d'emparler) have no operative significance in modern American law and are relevant only in historical research. The maritime/clearance sense is specific to French civil law and historical admiralty practice and does not appear as a term of art in American maritime law.
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