Definition
A French feudal obligation requiring a roturier — a commoner or non-noble subject — to supply goods for the royal household on credit, for a defined period, whenever the crown required such articles for domestic consumption. The obligation was unilateral: the commoner was compelled to furnish whatever the royal household demanded, with repayment promised but not guaranteed on any particular schedule. The term translates roughly as "right of taking" or "right of seizure," capturing the compulsory character of the duty from the crown's perspective.
Common Confusion
The fragment appearing in some editions of Black's Law Dictionary immediately preceding the droit de prise entry describes a separate French institution — the confiscation of a deceased foreigner's property to the state, known as the droit d'aubaine — which was abolished in 1819. These are distinct doctrines. Researchers encountering truncated or poorly paginated historical reprints should verify which right is actually being defined, as the two entries are sometimes run together in older digitized sources.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical legal scholarship and comparative feudal law contexts. Several navigation points matter:
First, the term is French feudal law specific. It has no common law analog and never migrated into English or American legal practice as a recognized doctrine. Researchers encountering it in primary sources are dealing with materials bearing on French legal history, comparative feudalism, or pre-Revolutionary French royal prerogative — not with any surviving legal obligation.
Second, the obligation falls on the roturier class specifically, distinguishing it from noble obligations and from general royal requisition powers. The class distinction is legally significant: this was a burden attached to commoner status, not a universal subject obligation or a military duty.
Third, the "on credit" character of the duty is what made it a legal obligation rather than simple confiscation. It occupied an uncomfortable middle ground between taxation, forced loan, and requisition — categories that had distinct legal treatments in French feudal doctrine. Researchers working on the fiscal or constitutional dimensions of the ancien régime will find the distinction meaningful.
Fourth, no American or English cases apply this doctrine. If the term appears in a domestic legal source outside a purely historical or comparative context, treat it as an error or affectation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in exact agreement, with Burrill's entry reproducing the same language nearly verbatim, both citing Stephen's Lectures (Steph. Lect. 351) as the underlying authority. This is consistent with both dictionaries drawing on the same English-language secondary source for French feudal terminology rather than French primary sources directly.
The shared reliance on Stephen's Lectures is worth noting: both dictionaries treat this as a settled, non-controversial definition. Neither source elaborates on how the credit obligation was enforced, what recourse a roturier had if repayment was not made, or how the doctrine related to other royal prerogatives such as purveyance in English law. The entries are descriptive rather than analytical.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any account of the doctrine's practical operation, its regional variation within France, its relationship to the Estates or to French constitutional conflicts over royal fiscal power, or its eventual fate under French legal reform. Researchers needing depth beyond the bare definition must consult specialized scholarship on French feudal and fiscal history.
Jurisdictional Note
Purely French feudal law. Never operative in English common law jurisdictions. The closest English analog — royal purveyance — operated under different legal principles and was abolished in England by statute in the seventeenth century.