Definition
An obsolete Saxon feudal obligation requiring tenants to contribute toward ale or other drink provided for the entertainment of their lord or his steward. Drinclean was not a payment in coin but a contribution in kind — tenants collectively supplied the means for a ceremonial or customary potation hosted on behalf of the lord. It belongs to the broader category of customary feudal dues and hospitality obligations that characterized the Anglo-Saxon manorial economy.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term has passed entirely out of ordinary English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term was already archaic by the nineteenth century and confined to legal and antiquarian sources.
The word's components — drawn from Old English roots related to drink and cleanliness or preparation — are intelligible in isolation, but the term as a legal concept has no equivalent in modern speech. Researchers encountering it in historical documents should not interpret it through any modern sense of the component words.
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Why It Matters in Research
Drinclean appears almost exclusively in antiquarian legal sources and in transcriptions of Anglo-Saxon charters, custumals, and manorial records. Researchers working with pre-Conquest or early post-Conquest English land tenure documents may encounter it as one of a cluster of named customary services owed by villeins and sokemen to their lords. Its practical significance lies less in its own right than in what it signals: documents listing drinclean alongside other named dues (such as boonwork, churchscot, or hearth penny) are typically describing a highly localized, customary tenure arrangement that predates systematic feudal theory.
The cross-reference in Black's second edition — truncated in the surviving text — points toward a related term (likely CEREVISIA or a similar entry on customary ale dues), suggesting that historical dictionaries treated drinclean as part of a small constellation of drink-related manorial obligations. Researchers should follow that thread into comparative entries.
A practical trap: because drinclean is recorded in Latin-language custumals as well as Old English documents, it may appear in variant spellings or Latinized forms. Scribal variation is considerable, and no single canonical spelling was ever standardized. Searching a corpus for this term should include spelling variants and Latin equivalents referencing potations or convivial entertainment owed to lords.
The term has no surviving legal force. No jurisdiction carries forward any equivalent obligation. Its research value is entirely historical and interpretive — useful for understanding the texture of Anglo-Saxon tenure arrangements and the hospitality economy of the early English manor.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary give essentially identical definitions, attributing the source to Cowell — John Cowell's *The Interpreter* (1607), one of the foundational English legal dictionaries. This attribution is the key provenance marker: Black's is not drawing on primary documentary sources here but on Cowell's earlier synthesis, which itself drew on antiquarian legal scholarship of the Tudor and early Stuart period.
Neither edition of Black's elaborates beyond the single-sentence definition. The second edition's cross-reference, though incomplete in the surviving text, points toward a companion entry on related Saxon drink dues — reinforcing that drinclean was understood as part of a type, not as an isolated curiosity. Neither edition situates the term within the broader framework of Anglo-Saxon tenure law or compares it to analogous obligations on the Continent.
What historical dictionaries miss: there is no discussion of how drinclean interacted with other customary services, no note on its geographic distribution within England, and no analysis of how it was recorded or enforced in practice. For that level of detail, researchers must look beyond legal dictionaries to Anglo-Saxon legal historians and to primary custumal scholarship.
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Jurisdictional Note
Drinclean is specific to the Anglo-Saxon English legal tradition. No parallel term or obligation exists in Scottish, Welsh, Irish, or Continental feudal law, though analogous hospitality dues (entertainments owed to lords) appear under different names across medieval European tenure systems.
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