Definition
A feudal term denoting a custom or tribute — that is, a periodic payment or obligatory render owed by a tenant or subject to a superior lord, arising from the customs of a particular manor or locality rather than from express contract. Cosduna belongs to the broader family of feudal dues and services that defined the economic relationship between lord and tenant in medieval England.
Why It Matters in Research
Cosduna is an archaic term with a narrow historical footprint. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it outside of feudal land records, medieval legal treatises, or historical scholarship on manorial customs. Its practical relevance is confined almost entirely to documents predating the systematic abolition of feudal tenures in England — a process culminating in the Tenures Abolition Act 1660. Any researcher tracing a chain of title through medieval English land records or examining obligations attached to copyhold and customary tenure should be alert to variant spellings and cognate terms, as scribal inconsistency in feudal records is common. The term will not appear in modern statutory or case law in any operative sense.
Note the placement of the entry in both Black's editions: the text for COSDUNA runs directly into the entry for COSEN/COZEN (meaning to cheat), and the second edition appears to have suffered a typographical corruption ("$8 Leon. 171" rather than "3 Leon. 171"). Researchers relying on digitized or OCR-processed versions of Black's should be aware that these adjacent entries are easily conflated or misread, and that the source reference belongs to COSEN, not to COSDUNA.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary define COSDUNA identically and minimally: a custom or tribute in feudal law. Neither edition provides elaboration, case authority, or a statutory reference specific to the term. The brevity is itself informative — by the time Black's was compiled, cosduna had long since ceased to carry operative legal significance, and its appearance in the dictionary is essentially antiquarian. The entries do not identify the geographic or jurisdictional scope of the term's historical use, nor do they distinguish cosduna from other feudal renders such as tallage, cornage, or scutage.
The adjacency problem noted above — COSEN/COZEN following immediately in the text — is reproduced across both editions, suggesting the second edition was set from the first without independent verification of this cluster of entries.