Definition
To ship; to cause goods or persons to be conveyed by water. An archaic verb appearing in early English legal usage to denote the act of loading or placing aboard a vessel for maritime transport. The term is closely associated with its nominal derivative, eskippeson (also rendered eskippeson), which denoted the act or fact of shipping or the passage itself — that is, the transportation by sea.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recorded as a standard English word in contemporary use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded. The term does not appear in Webster's 1913, reflecting its obsolescence even by the nineteenth century.
Editorial note: Eskipper has no surviving common English counterpart. Its root — the Middle English and Anglo-French vocabulary of maritime commerce — gave rise to the modern verb "to ship," but eskipper itself dropped from both legal and ordinary usage long before the modern era. A researcher encountering it in a historical document should not assume it carries any of the specialized commercial or logistical freight that "shipping" carries in modern trade law.
Why It Matters in Research
Eskipper and eskippeson belong to the vocabulary of medieval English maritime and mercantile law. Researchers working in early English legal records — particularly plea rolls, port records, or mercantile contracts predating the sixteenth century — may encounter either term in contexts concerning liability for goods loaded aboard a vessel, charter arrangements, or passage agreements. The terms will not appear in modern statutory or case law and are effectively dead letters in any living legal system.
The chief research trap is conflation with adjacent terms. Eskippeson is the noun form and is distinct from eskipper the verb, though both derive from the same root and appear in the same documentary contexts. Rapalje and Lawrence's entry is thin — essentially a one-line gloss crediting Jacob's Law Dictionary — and offers no guidance on how these terms functioned within the broader framework of medieval maritime obligation or carrier liability. Researchers should treat the Rapalje and Lawrence entry as a pointer, not a source.
For anyone tracing the historical development of carrier liability or maritime transport obligations in English law, eskipper and eskippeson are early markers in a chain that runs through the law merchant, the admiralty courts, and eventually into modern common carrier doctrine. The conceptual territory they occupy — the legal moment at which goods or persons are committed to a vessel — later became contested ground in bills of lading, charter party interpretation, and delivery obligation cases. Understanding the archaic vocabulary helps researchers recognize how early the law was attentive to the precise act of loading as a legally significant event.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje and Lawrence (1883) provide only the barest entry: the definition "to ship," a one-line cross-reference to the noun form eskippeson, and attribution to Jacob's Law Dictionary. Giles Jacob's Law Dictionary (various editions from the early eighteenth century onward) is the upstream source cited, though Jacob himself was working from even earlier glossarists. The chain of transmission — Jacob to Rapalje and Lawrence — illustrates how archaic maritime vocabulary was carried forward in legal dictionaries largely by rote, without substantive doctrinal elaboration.
No entry for eskipper or eskippeson appears in Black's Law Dictionary or Bouvier's Law Dictionary, suggesting the terms were already regarded as too archaic for practical legal reference by the mid-nineteenth century. The absence from those standard American reference works is itself informative: by the time American legal lexicography was consolidated, this vocabulary had been fully displaced by ordinary English equivalents and statutory language governing maritime transport.
Historical dictionaries as a class offer little help beyond the Jacob-derived gloss. Researchers requiring depth on the medieval legal context of these terms are better served by specialized works on the law merchant and English admiralty history than by the standard legal dictionary shelf.
Jurisdictional Note
Eskipper and eskippeson are terms of English legal origin and have no recorded independent usage in Scots, Irish, or colonial American legal sources. They belong entirely to the English common law and law merchant tradition.