Definition
DOLE carries two distinct legal meanings in historical sources, separated by jurisdiction and context.
1. Share or portion (Old English land law). A dole is a defined share or allotted portion of land or other divisible property, most commonly encountered in the phrase dole-meadow — a meadow divided among several persons, each holding a share rather than an exclusive parcel. The term carries the general sense of measured distribution: to "dole out" is to deal in portions. The underlying concept is partition or allotment, not gift.
2. Criminal intent (Scots law). In Scottish legal usage, dole means criminal intent or evil design — the mental element of a crime, roughly equivalent to the civil law concept of dolus or the common law concept of mens rea. This usage derives from the Latin dolus rather than the Old English dal and is unrelated to the land law meaning.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To distribute in small amounts; to share out small portions of a meager resource.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Grief; sorrow; lamentation. [Archaic] — "And she died. So that day there was dole in Astolat." (Tennyson)
The Webster's 1913 definition reflects an older poetic and archaic sense of dole as grief or mourning, entirely absent from the legal record. The modern common usage — distributing small amounts — actually aligns closely with the Old English land law meaning (allotment of shares), though it has shed the technical property context. Researchers encountering dole in pre-modern legal texts should resist both the archaic grief sense and the informal welfare-payment connotation that the word carries in twentieth-century British English.
Common Confusion
Three meanings cluster around this word and must be kept distinct:
— The land law meaning (a share of divided property) is the dominant legal sense in English sources.
— The Scots law meaning (criminal intent) is entirely separate in origin and applies only in that jurisdiction's criminal law tradition.
— The modern colloquial sense of government welfare payments (British English: "on the dole") is a social policy usage, not a term of art in private law. It does not appear in historical legal dictionaries and should not be read back into older texts.
Additionally, researchers working in constitutional law will encounter DOLE as a case name — South Dakota v. Dole — in the context of congressional spending power. This is a proper noun, not the legal term defined here, though the encyclopedia cross-reference above addresses it directly.
Why It Matters in Research
The land law sense of dole is a term of Old English and medieval property practice that surfaces in conveyancing documents, manorial records, and enclosure proceedings. Researchers working with pre-enclosure agricultural land records or early American property disputes rooted in English common law may encounter dole-meadow or dole in descriptions of shared pasture and meadow rights. It belongs to the same conceptual family as common rights, stints, and lot-meadow arrangements.
The Scots law meaning — criminal intent — is significant for researchers using Scottish legal sources or comparative criminal law materials. The term dolus in Roman-derived civil law systems is the cognate concept, and researchers moving between Scots, civilian, and common law sources need to recognize that dole in a Scottish criminal law context signals the mens rea discussion, not a property division.
One navigational trap: twentieth-century legal and policy literature uses "dole" informally to mean unemployment assistance or welfare payments (particularly in British sources). This usage can appear in legal periodicals, parliamentary debates, and administrative law materials from the early-to-mid 1900s onward. It is not a term of art and will not be indexed as such in historical legal dictionaries, but it can create confusion when a researcher encounters it alongside the classical property or criminal law senses.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in broad agreement on the core meanings. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's all define dole in its land law sense as a share or portion, with Burrill tracing the word to the Saxon dal and the verb dalan (to divide or distribute). Bouvier adds the compound dole-meadow and cites Spelman and Cowel. Black's and Burrill both record the Scots law sense — criminal intent, evil design — citing Bell's Dictionary of the Law of Scotland.
No historical dictionary in this corpus addresses the welfare-payment usage, which is consistent with its twentieth-century origin as a social policy term rather than a legal one. The Rapalje & Lawrence excerpt in the source material does not contain a relevant dole entry and appears to have been drawn from adjacent content; it adds nothing to the analysis of this term.
The Webster's 1913 sense of dole as grief is entirely absent from all legal dictionaries, confirming that the archaic literary meaning had no purchase in legal usage even by the nineteenth century.
Jurisdictional Note
The criminal intent meaning of dole is specific to Scots law and should not be imported into English common law analysis. In English and American sources, the property/allotment meaning controls. Researchers using Scottish criminal law materials from any period should treat dole as the operative mens rea term in that tradition.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Constitutional Law — Congressional Spending Conditions: Coercion vs. Encouragement (constitutional_22). Addresses South Dakota v. Dole and NFIB v. Sebelius — the leading cases on congressional power to attach conditions to federal spending. The case name Dole is a proper noun (the Secretary of Transportation), not this dictionary term, but the encyclopedia entry is essential context for any constitutional law researcher who encounters "Dole" in a spending-power discussion.