Definition
An alehouse; a place licensed for the retail sale and on-premises consumption of ale. The term is drawn from early English usage and appears in historical legal documents, statutes, and records concerning the regulation of drinking establishments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in current common use; archaic.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately entered; the component words "ale" and "house" are individually defined, with "alehouse" described as a house where ale is retailed and drinking is carried on.
The term ealehus has no living presence in ordinary English. Researchers encountering it in historical legal records should recognize it as a direct Anglo-Saxon compound whose legal significance lies entirely in its regulatory context — the licensing and control of retail drinking establishments under early English law.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of purely archival and historical relevance. Researchers will encounter ealehus only in pre-modern English legal instruments, manorial records, ecclesiastical regulations, and early statutory compilations dealing with the governance of alehouses. Its practical importance lies in its relationship to a long tradition of licensing law: English authorities regulated alehouses from at least the medieval period, and the alehouse keeper's legal status — liability for disturbances, obligations to maintain order, and accountability under local assize authority — generated substantial documentary records.
When searching Law Mind's historical corpus, note that the same institution may appear under variant spellings and successor terms across different periods. Medieval records may use ealehus or latinized equivalents; Tudor and Stuart sources shift toward "alehouse," "victualling house," or "tippling house"; later licensing statutes use "public house" or "licensed premises." A search limited to ealehus will return only the earliest stratum of sources. Broaden searches accordingly when tracing the regulatory history of retail drinking establishments across the full corpus.
There are no modern legal proceedings in which this term appears. Its value to the researcher is lexicographic and historical: confirming the meaning of an unfamiliar term encountered in a primary source, and orienting that source within the broader arc of English licensing law.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three shelf sources are in complete agreement. Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence each define ealehus simply as "an alehouse," with the first and second editions of Black's additionally noting the Anglo-Saxon components: eale (ale) and hus (house). There is no divergence among the sources and no elaboration beyond the bare definition in any of them.
The historical dictionaries do not address the regulatory framework surrounding the alehouse, the licensing obligations of its keeper, or the body of assize and statutory law that governed such establishments. Researchers seeking that context must look beyond the dictionary shelf to primary sources and legal histories of early English licensing regulation. The dictionaries serve their purpose here: they identify the term and no more.