Definition
Dry multures (also dry multure) is a term from Scots law denoting a compulsory payment of a fixed quantity of grain or meal to the proprietor of a mill, owed by tenants or inhabitants within a mill's designated district (the "sucken") regardless of whether they actually bring grain to be ground there. The obligation ran with the land and the mill franchise, not with the act of grinding. Where ordinary multures were dues paid as a proportion of grain actually milled, dry multures were payable as a feudal incident even when no milling occurred.
Common Confusion
The term is closely related to, but distinct from, several overlapping mill-dues concepts:
MULTURES (or thirlage multures): The standard toll taken as a fraction of grain when tenants ground at the thirled mill. These were dues on actual grinding. Dry multures required no such transaction.
SEQUELS: Additional customary payments owed in connection with thirlage, sometimes in meal, sometimes in service. Sequels were likewise distinct from dry multures.
THIRLAGE: The broader servitude or obligation binding tenants to use a particular mill. Dry multures were one species of obligation arising within a thirlage arrangement, but thirlage as a whole was wider and included the duty to grind as well as the various dues attached to grinding.
Why It Matters in Research
Dry multures appear almost exclusively in Scots legal materials and in feudal property records; researchers encountering the term outside Scotland should treat the source with suspicion. The concept is tied to the system of thirlage, which was progressively abolished and restricted in Scotland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Thirlage Act 1799 (39 Geo. III c. 55) significantly curtailed enforcement of thirlage obligations, and subsequent case law and conveyancing practice worked further erosion. By the mid-nineteenth century, dry multures were largely a conveyancing artifact — appearing in title deeds and feudal charters as historical burdens rather than living obligations.
For corpus researchers, this creates a practical trap: the term appears frequently in pre-1800 Scottish legal materials (decisions of the Court of Session, feudal instruments, agricultural leases) in a fully operative sense, then persists in nineteenth-century title deeds and commentary as a described but largely unenforceable relic. The weight and significance of the term shifts dramatically across the chronological corpus. A researcher pulling all instances of "dry multures" without attention to date and context will conflate live litigation with historical recitation.
The term also appears in English legal dictionaries (Wharton, Burrill) chiefly as a cross-reference to Scots law, with minimal substantive treatment. Those entries should be treated as pointers back to Scots primary sources rather than as independent authority. English common law had no equivalent institution; the English mill-due system operated on different feudal principles.
Researchers working on Scottish agricultural history, feudal land tenure, estate management records, or the history of servitudes will encounter dry multures most substantively. For conveyancing purposes, the term in a nineteenth-century deed signals a feudal burden whose enforceability required careful analysis of whether thirlage had been validly constituted and had survived legislative curtailment.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry, drawing on Wharton's Lex, is brief to the point of skeletal: "Quantities of corn paid to a mill, whether the payers grind or not." This accurately captures the essential feature — payment decoupled from use — but says nothing about the feudal mechanism that produced the obligation, the sucken geography that defined who owed the duty, or the legal controversies around proof and enforcement that filled Scottish legal literature from the seventeenth century onward.
Neither Burrill nor Wharton situates dry multures within the larger thirlage structure, which is the only context that makes the concept fully intelligible. The historical dictionaries treat it as a curiosity of Scots law worth noting but not worth explaining. For practical research purposes, this means English-language general legal dictionaries are nearly useless on this term, and researchers must go directly to Scots institutional writers — Bell's Principles, Erskine's Institute, and Stair's Institutions — for substantive treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
Dry multures is a term of Scots law with no recognized counterpart in English common law or in any American jurisdiction. It belongs to a feudal system of mill servitudes that was specific to Scotland and is now of primarily historical interest following eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legislative reform.