Definition
Latin: "with privilege." A phrase historically inscribed in or on publications to indicate that the printer held an exclusive royal or institutional license to publish a specific work — most notably, the Bible in England. The phrase functioned as a notice of monopoly: it announced that the named printer (the Crown's patentee, or the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge) possessed the sole legal right to produce and sell that work, and that unauthorized reproduction was prohibited under royal authority.
The phrase is not a legal doctrine but a legal declaration — a printed assertion of privilege equivalent in function to a modern copyright notice, though grounded in royal patent rather than statutory intellectual property law.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not independently defined. The component words are Latin: "cum" (with) and "privilegio" (privilege, from privilegium).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not defined as a standalone entry. "Privilege" in Webster's carries the sense of a special right or immunity granted to a particular person or class.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is primarily historical rather than semantic. A modern reader encountering the phrase on an old title page might read it as a generic statement of endorsement or approval. In legal and publishing history, it was a precise term of art: a monopoly grant enforceable against competing printers, backed by Crown authority and, later, the Stationers' Company registration system.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will almost always be working in one of two contexts: (1) the history of English printing monopolies and early intellectual property law, or (2) the interpretation of historical legal instruments referencing royal patents and privileges.
Several navigational points are essential:
The phrase predates modern copyright. It belongs to a system of royal prerogative and guild regulation — the Stationers' Company monopoly, Crown patents for law books and the Bible — that operated from roughly the mid-sixteenth century until the Statute of Anne (1710) began displacing it. Researchers must resist mapping modern copyright concepts onto this regime. The privilege was not a creator's right; it was a printer's or publisher's franchise, typically granted by the Crown or confirmed by university charter.
The Bible monopoly is the term's primary legal reference point in the Black's entries. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge held their Bible-printing privileges by royal charter. The King's Printer held a separate patent. Disputes over the scope and validity of these privileges generated significant legal controversy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Researchers exploring that litigation will need to engage with primary sources outside the dictionary shelf.
The phrase also appears on title pages of legal books. The "royal printers" held privileges covering law books as well as Scripture, and the phrase cum privilegio (sometimes cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum) appears in early printed editions of statutes and legal texts. A researcher examining a historical legal edition should treat the phrase as evidence of the edition's provenance and authorized status — relevant when establishing whether a given text was the official or authoritative version of a statute or report.
Watch for corpus truncation in the Black's entries. Both editions lead directly from the definition of cum privilegio into the unrelated Latin maxim "Cum quod ago non valet ut ago, valeat quantum valere potest" — a standard alphabetical adjacency in the source dictionaries, not a related doctrine. Researchers should not infer any substantive connection between the two.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions give identical, minimal treatment: a single-sentence identification of the phrase as expressing the Bible-printing monopoly of Oxford, Cambridge, and the royal printers. Neither edition elaborates on the legal mechanism, the history of the privilege, or its relationship to the broader system of printing patents.
This sparse treatment reflects the phrase's status as a historical artifact rather than an active legal term by the time Black's was compiled. The dictionaries preserve the meaning accurately but without context. Researchers needing depth on the underlying legal regime will find the dictionaries insufficient and should look beyond them to histories of the Stationers' Company, treatises on royal prerogative and patent grants, and scholarship on the prehistory of copyright.
Neither edition notes the broader application of cum privilegio to non-biblical texts, including law books — a meaningful omission for legal historians.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is a creature of English law and has no direct equivalent in American legal history. U.S. researchers may encounter it only in the context of colonial-era imports of English legal texts or in scholarship on the roots of Anglo-American copyright law.
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