Definition
A customary pottage (a thick grain- or vegetable-based dish) historically prepared for the English monarch's table on coronation day. The term carries legal significance because land was held of the king by grand serjeantry — a form of feudal tenure — on the specific condition of providing this dish at the coronation ceremony. The obligation was not merely ceremonial custom but a legally cognizable service that defined the terms of land tenure and the relationship between the crown and the tenant.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Listed as an alternative form of "dillegrout," with no independent definition — the term is treated as a spelling variant rather than a word in active modern use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered. The term had passed entirely out of ordinary English by the nineteenth century.
The gap here is the reverse of the usual problem. There is no meaningful common meaning to distinguish from the legal meaning — dilligrout survives almost exclusively as a legal and historical curiosity. A researcher encountering the term in a common-law source should treat it as a technical term of feudal tenure, not a culinary reference gone astray.
Why It Matters in Research
Dilligrout is not a term a researcher will encounter in litigation, but it surfaces in exactly the kind of material Law Mind's corpus includes: treatises on feudal tenure, coronation records, manorial history, and the antiquarian legal literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its significance is structural rather than substantive — it is an example of grand serjeantry, which is the doctrinal category that matters.
Researchers working through materials on feudal land tenure, the nature of serjeantry obligations, or the evolution of tenure into freehold will find dilligrout cited as an illustration of how personal and customary services could constitute the entire basis of a landholding. It demonstrates the principle that serjeantry obligations were not merely honorific but constituted consideration in the feudal sense — a failure to perform could theoretically imperil the tenure.
The term also appears in discussions of coronation ceremony and royal household obligations, where the legal and the ceremonial are difficult to separate. A researcher should be alert to this overlap: the same passage may be read as constitutional history, property law, or ceremonial record depending on context.
The citation in Rapalje & Lawrence to 39 Hen. III (1255) places this obligation in the mid-thirteenth century. Researchers should note that by the time Blackstone and later commentators discuss serjeantry, many of these specific customs had become archaic or had been commuted. The term's appearance in a source does not establish that the obligation was being actively enforced at the time of writing — it is more often cited as an illustration of what serjeantry once encompassed.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three sources agree entirely. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence give substantively identical definitions: pottage made for the king's coronation table, held by tenure in serjeantry. This level of agreement signals a term that is historically settled and uncontested — no court was debating what dilligrout meant.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only source to include a date reference (39 Hen. III), which gives researchers a statutory or record anchor. Black's drops this detail in both editions, which is the only meaningful divergence across the three sources.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: how the obligation was discharged in practice, what happened when the tenure passed to a new holder before a coronation occurred, or whether the service was ever commuted to a money payment as other serjeantry obligations commonly were. Researchers needing that depth will need to look beyond the dictionary literature to Selden, Spelman, or Coke on tenure.
Jurisdictional Note
Grand serjeantry and its associated customs were features of English feudal tenure. They have no counterpart in American law, which received English common law but not the structure of feudal land tenure. This term is relevant only in the context of English legal history.