Definition
Cosbering was a feudal prerogative by which a lord held the right to lodge himself and his retinue at the homes of his tenants, compelling those tenants to provide food, drink, and hospitality at their own expense. The obligation ran with the tenancy: the tenant owed the lord not merely rent or labor, but the physical burden of entertaining him and his followers when he chose to arrive. Cosbering was one of several seignorial exactions that extracted value from tenants in the form of hospitality rather than money or service.
Common Confusion
Cosbering is sometimes grouped loosely with purveyance or with similar hospitality-based feudal obligations, but it is a distinct concept. Purveyance was a crown prerogative to requisition goods and transport for royal use; cosbering was a private seignorial right exercised by lords over their own tenants. Coshering — the spelling varies — should also not be confused with coyne and livery, the related Irish feudal exaction by which lords billeted soldiers on tenants. The terms address overlapping abuses but differ in their subject (lord versus military force) and their historical legal treatment.
Why It Matters in Research
Cosbering appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with Irish or Anglo-Norman feudal tenure. Researchers encountering the term in historical land records, estate litigation, or treatises on Irish land law should treat it as a marker of the seignorial system specific to that context, not as a general common-law incident of English tenure. The term is largely extinct in operative legal usage; its significance in the corpus is historical and interpretive rather than doctrinal.
The spelling is unstable across sources. Variant forms include coshering, coshrie, and cosbrie. When searching historical indices, title records, or digitized manuscript sources, researchers should run variant-form searches rather than relying on a single spelling. Failure to do so will produce artificially thin results.
Cosbering is relevant to understanding the broader catalog of feudal oppression that drove Irish land reform agitation in the nineteenth century. Documents produced in that political and legal context — parliamentary testimony, agrarian pamphlets, land commission reports — will often invoke cosbering as a historical grievance, not as a currently operative right. The researcher must distinguish between sources that describe cosbering as a living legal claim and those that invoke it rhetorically as evidence of historical wrong.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier defines cosbering as a feudal lord's prerogative to lie and feast himself and his followers at tenants' houses, citing Cowel's Interpreter. Cowel's Interpreter (1607) is the original locus classicus for this term in the English legal dictionary tradition; Bouvier's entry is effectively a condensation of Cowel. The definition is narrow and consistent across sources that carry it at all, which are few.
What historical dictionaries do not supply is any treatment of how cosbering was litigated, abated, or extinguished. There is no common-law case development tracked in Bouvier or its contemporaries, which suggests the right was either absorbed into broader feudal abolition statutes or simply fell away as the social conditions sustaining it disappeared. Researchers should not expect to find cosbering as a standalone claim in reported cases; its legal life was customary and local rather than adjudicated.
Jurisdictional Note
Cosbering is associated primarily with Irish feudal tenure under Anglo-Norman influence. Its appearance in purely English land law sources is sparse. Researchers working in Scottish or Welsh historical materials may encounter analogous hospitality exactions under different names, but cosbering as a term of art belongs principally to the Irish context.