Definition
De stapulis (Latin: "of staples") is the title of an English statute enacted in 1353 under Edward III (27 Edw. III, st. 2), establishing a comprehensive legal framework governing merchants who traded at the designated staple towns. A "staple" was an officially appointed market town through which specific commodities — principally wool, wool-fells, leather, and lead — were required by royal decree to be channeled for export. The statute de stapulis created the institutional and commercial law applicable to those merchants attending the English staples following the Crown's decision to relocate the staple from Flanders back to England.
The statute functioned as a self-contained commercial code: it addressed the establishment of mayors and constables of the staple, the jurisdiction of staple courts, the law merchant as applied within staple precincts, and the rights and obligations of foreign and domestic merchants trading in staple goods. It is one of the early English instruments formally incorporating the Law Merchant into domestic legal administration.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering de stapulis in historical sources should understand it as a reference to a specific statute, not to a general doctrine. The phrase appears primarily as a statute title citation in medieval and early modern legal writing; when Burrill and similar authorities cite it, they are pointing to 27 Edw. III, st. 2 as a primary source for staple law, not to any broader common law principle.
The staple system is foundational context for understanding medieval commercial law in England. Disputes arising under de stapulis were adjudicated not in common law courts but in the mayor's court of the staple, applying the Law Merchant — a distinct body of mercantile custom. Researchers working on the development of commercial law, the Law Merchant, or early English trade regulation will find this statute a central node. It predates and informs later instruments such as the statute of statute-merchant (de statuto mercatorio), which Burrill treats in the immediately following entry.
Note that Burrill's entry cuts off mid-sentence into the adjacent entry (de statuto mercatorio), a common artifact of compressed dictionary formats. Researchers using Burrill should be alert to this structural bleed between entries.
The staple towns established or reorganized under this statute included Calais, which later became the dominant wool staple. Tracking the geographic movement of the staple — Flanders to England, and later consolidated at Calais — is essential for placing individual documentary references in their correct commercial and legal context. A document invoking staple jurisdiction in 1353 may carry different implications than one from 1363 or later.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole dictionary source here, and his entry is brief but precise. He correctly identifies the statute by regnal year and session (27 Edw. III, st. 2) and characterizes it as "a complete code of laws for the regulation of the merchants who attended the staples of wool." He cites Daines Barrington's Observations on the Statutes (at page 282) as secondary authority — Barrington's work being an eighteenth-century treatise examining early English statutes in historical context, and a legitimate source for this period.
Burrill does not address the administrative machinery the statute created (the mayor and constables of the staple, the staple courts), nor does he discuss its relationship to the Law Merchant. Historical dictionaries generally treat de stapulis as a title reference and do not excavate its substantive provisions. For those provisions, researchers must go to the statute itself or to historical scholarship on medieval English commercial law.
Jurisdictional Note
De stapulis is English in origin and jurisdiction. It has no direct equivalent in Scots, Irish, or colonial American law, though the concept of designated trading staples appeared in various forms across European commercial systems. The statute's relevance today is purely historical — it is not operative law — but it remains significant for English legal history, the history of commercial law, and the development of mercantile courts.