Definition
A dagge is an archaic term for a type of firearm — specifically, a short-barreled pistol or hand-held gun of the kind in use during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term appears in English legal sources primarily in the context of weapons offenses, statutes regulating arms, and state trials where the identity of a weapon was at issue. It is not a term of active legal doctrine but a historical descriptor used to identify a particular class of weapon in older proceedings.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of "dag," meaning either a dagger or a type of pistol.
Historical common usage: The term does not appear in Webster's 1913, reflecting its obsolescence by the nineteenth century even in general usage.
Editorial note: The common usage preserves two senses — bladed weapon and firearm — that could mislead a researcher reading historical legal materials. In the legal sources where "dagge" appears, the firearm sense controls. A reader encountering the term in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century indictment or trial record and assuming it refers to a bladed weapon may misread the nature of the offense or the weapon at issue.
Common Confusion
Dagge and dagger are sometimes conflated, understandably given their shared root. In legal records, "dagger" consistently refers to a bladed weapon, while "dagge" in the sources collected here refers to a firearm. The two should not be treated as synonyms when interpreting historical criminal proceedings or weapons statutes. Separately, "dagge" should not be confused with "dag" in the sense of a hanging shred or pointed strip — a wholly unrelated term that also appears in historical texts.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear in corpus materials almost exclusively in two contexts: state trial records from the Tudor and Stuart periods, and treatises or digests that quote or gloss those records. The anchor citation in all three source dictionaries — 1 How. State Tr. 1124, 1125 — points to Howell's State Trials, a multivolume collection of English criminal proceedings. Researchers working with that collection or with early modern criminal law materials should treat "dagge" as a weapon-identification term requiring period-specific interpretation.
The key research trap is anachronism. Modern firearms classifications do not map onto this term. Do not attempt to interpret "dagge" through the lens of later gun-control statutes or modern weapon categories. The term belongs to a pre-standardization vocabulary of arms, and its legal significance in any given document depends entirely on the specific proceedings in which it appears.
Researchers should also note that Burrill's entry for DAGGE bleeds immediately into the entry for DALE AND SALE, which concerns fictitious place names used in English legal examples — a completely unrelated term. This adjacency in the dictionary text is a function of alphabetical layout, not conceptual connection, and should not be read as linking the two entries.
WHY IT MATTERS IN RESEARCH (CORPUS CONNECTIONS)
If the Law Mind corpus includes Howell's State Trials or early English criminal law treatises, "dagge" is a search term worth adding to any query involving weapons, homicide, or assault in pre-1700 English proceedings. It will not appear in American legal materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition — a kind of gun — and all three anchor the term to the same passage in Howell's State Trials. This unanimity reflects the narrow evidentiary basis for the entry: the dictionaries are essentially glossing a single source rather than synthesizing a developed legal usage.
Black's first and second editions both pair DAGGE with the immediately following entry DAGUS or DAIS (a raised floor at the upper end of a hall), treating them as sequential alphabetical entries. Burrill does the same, though his text runs DAGGE into the DALE AND SALE entry in a way that could create confusion in rapid reading.
None of the three dictionaries addresses the bladed-weapon sense of the word or acknowledges the ambiguity between dagge-as-dagger and dagge-as-pistol. This is a meaningful omission for researchers who encounter the term outside the Howell's citation, where context may not resolve the ambiguity automatically.
Jurisdictional Note
DAGGE is an English legal term with no American legal history. It is irrelevant to U.S. legal research except as a historical curiosity in comparative or legal history contexts.