Definition
Extracta curie (Latin: "extracts of the court") refers to the issues or profits arising from the holding of a court — specifically, the customary fees, perquisites, and incidental revenues generated in the course of court proceedings. The term describes the financial yield of a court sitting as a going concern: fines, fees for writs, amercements, and similar charges that accrued to the lord or officer entitled to hold the court.
The term is encountered almost exclusively in the context of manorial and ecclesiastical courts in England, where the right to hold a court carried with it an entitlement to its extracta — the revenues the court produced as a matter of custom and privilege.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow term of manorial and ecclesiastical law with no continuing doctrinal life in modern common law. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in three contexts: (1) records and surveys of manorial courts, particularly in documents concerning the profits and incidents of lordship; (2) treatises and antiquarian works on parish and manorial history, of which Kennett's Parochial Antiquities — the source cited by Rapalje & Lawrence — is a primary example; and (3) legal dictionaries and glossaries that preserve obsolete Latin terminology for the purpose of reading historical instruments.
The principal research trap is treating extracta curie as synonymous with the broader class of manorial incidents (such as suit of court, heriot, or relief). Extracta curie is specifically the revenue product of the court's operation — the fees and customary charges — not the tenure-based incidents owed by tenants as obligations of landholding. The distinction matters when interpreting grants or conveyances of manorial rights, where a grantor might separately convey the court leet, the court baron, and the extracta of each.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on manorial tenure, feudal incidents, or the history of local courts should treat this term as a pointer toward the financial administration of private jurisdiction, and should read it alongside entries for court leet, court baron, and amercement to reconstruct the full economic picture of a medieval or early modern court.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence give a compact and reliable definition: "the issues or profits of holding a court, arising from the customary fees, &c." with a citation to Parochial Antiquities (Kennett, Paroch. Antiq. 572). This is the standard treatment in legal dictionaries of the period, and the definition is consistent across antiquarian and legal glossarial sources that touch on manorial terminology. No meaningful divergence exists among historical authorities on the core meaning.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the practical scope of what counted as extracta in any given court — this varied by manor, by custom, and by the type of court being held. A court leet might generate amercements for presentments of nuisances and petty offenses; a court baron might produce fees for admission of copyhold tenants. Both would contribute to the extracta, but the composition differed. Researchers should not assume uniformity across manors or periods.
The Latin form is invariably used in legal and historical sources; no English equivalent gained currency, which is itself an indication of how thoroughly the term remained embedded in the Latin-language records of manorial administration.
Jurisdictional Note
Extracta curie is a term of English manorial and ecclesiastical law with no recognized equivalent in American, Scottish, or continental legal systems. It is irrelevant outside the context of English manorial records and the legal literature interpreting them.