Definition
In English university usage, gaudies (singular: gaudy) refers to double commons — that is, an allowance of provisions or commons given at twice the ordinary daily rate on certain feast days or occasions of celebration. The term appears in legal dictionaries primarily as a term of institutional custom, reflecting the regulated allocation of food, drink, and other provisions within English colleges and halls, governed by college statutes and internal governance instruments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "gaudy."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not record "gaudies" as a distinct legal or institutional term, though "gaudy" appears in the sense of a showy or festive object, and separately as an English university feast or celebration.
The gap here is meaningful. In ordinary English, "gaudy" primarily connotes something ostentatiously bright or tasteless. In the university context — and in legal dictionaries — "gaudies" refers to a specific entitlement under college custom: double the standard daily commons allocation distributed on feast days. The festive sense in English university tradition (a gaudy as a celebratory dinner for alumni) is related but distinct from the rationed-provisions meaning captured in the legal sources.
Common Confusion
Gaudies as double commons should not be confused with the modern university use of "gaudy" (or "gaudy night") to mean a formal alumni feast or college celebration dinner. The two senses share an origin in the Latin gaudium (joy, festivity) and the same institutional setting, but they describe different things: one is a distribution of extra provisions under college custom, the other is a social event. Researchers encountering "gaudy" or "gaudies" in historical college records must determine from context which sense is operative.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is effectively a fossil in the legal dictionary corpus — all three sources reproduce the identical one-line definition without expansion, suggesting the compilers included it for completeness rather than because it generated litigation or legal controversy. Researchers are most likely to encounter gaudies in:
— Historical documents relating to English college governance, college statutes, and the internal administration of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, where commons allocations were a matter of formal institutional rule.
— Disputes over college entitlements, fellowship rights, or the interpretation of college statutes, where the precise meaning of customary allocations could bear on legal questions of membership, discipline, or property.
— Ecclesiastical and educational history sources that overlap with legal history, particularly records touching on the Inns of Court or collegiate foundations.
The term is not a live term of modern English law and will not appear in contemporary legal practice. Its presence in Black's and Bouvier's reflects the nineteenth-century ambition of those dictionaries to catalog the full vocabulary of Anglo-American legal and institutional life, including terms drawn from university and ecclesiastical custom. Researchers should treat any encounter with the term as a signal that the source material is dealing with pre-modern English collegiate governance rather than common law doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement, each offering the identical definition without elaboration. No source provides context about which feast days qualified, how the entitlement was calculated, or what legal consequences attached to its denial or misallocation. The uniformity across all three sources, combined with their brevity, suggests the compilers were drawing from a common predecessor source rather than independent research. Historical sources miss entirely the procedural and statutory context that would make the term analytically useful — there is no discussion of the college statutes under which gaudies were granted, nor of any reported disputes arising from their allocation.