Definition
In old English law, the issues or profits arising from the holding of a court, derived from customary fees and similar perquisites attending the exercise of manorial or seigniorial jurisdiction. The term denotes the financial yield or pecuniary benefit accruing to a lord or other court-holder by virtue of the court's operation — distinct from the substantive judicial power itself, and instead referring to the revenue stream that power generated.
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Why It Matters in Research
EXTRACTA OCURIZ is a term of narrow historical application. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in documents relating to manorial courts, feudal tenure records, and the administration of private jurisdictions in medieval and early modern England. Because it designates a category of revenue rather than a legal proceeding or status, it will appear most often in surveys, extents, rentals, and court rolls where the economic yields of a lord's court were tallied alongside other manorial income such as rents, fines, and amercements.
The practical research trap here is taxonomic: the profits of court were a recognized component of manorial value and appear in records organized by income type rather than by legal concept. A researcher working through a manorial extent or a plea of quo warranto should expect these profits to be listed alongside timber, fisheries, and villain labor rather than alongside procedural records.
The term does not survive into modern legal usage. By the time English legal vocabulary was being standardized and codified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the institutional basis for private court profits had largely been dismantled or absorbed into the centralized court system. Researchers working in transitional periods — particularly the seventeenth century — should be alert to the possibility that records use English equivalents ("issues of court," "court profits," "perquisites of court") to describe what earlier sources label by this Latin formula.
There is no meaningful American reception of this term. Its relevance is confined to English legal history and to the study of documents governed by that tradition.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only entry among the shelf sources and offers a compact but accurate definition: "the issues or profits of holding a court, arising from the customary fees, etc." This is consistent with how manorial lawyers and record-keepers understood the concept across the medieval period. The entry is immediately followed by the definition of EXTRADITION — a juxtaposition that reflects only alphabetical proximity and should not suggest any conceptual relationship between the two terms.
No other shelf source in the Law Mind corpus carries an independent entry for EXTRACTA OCURIZ, which itself signals the term's status: it is a term of art belonging to the specialized vocabulary of feudal tenure and private jurisdiction, not to the general common law vocabulary that later dictionaries aimed to codify. Researchers should treat Black's compressed entry as a starting point and consult specialized glossaries of medieval Latin legal terms — particularly Du Cange's Glossarium and the glossaries appended to editions of Fleta, Bracton, or the Dialogus de Scaccario — for fuller context.
The first component, extracta, carries the sense of "extractions" or "takings" — sums drawn out from a process. The second component, ocuriz or similar variant spellings in manuscript sources, is associated with the court or its proceedings. The compound thus describes, in functional terms, what flows financially from the court's operation, not what the court does.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the English manorial and feudal legal tradition. It has no counterpart in Scots law, civil law systems, or American jurisprudence. Researchers working in Welsh, Irish, or Channel Islands records may encounter analogous concepts under different terminology.
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