Definition
Goods and merchandize is a phrase used in older legal instruments, pleadings, and statutes to denote personal property — that is, movable, tangible property as distinguished from real property (land and fixtures). The phrase functioned as a collective term of art, typically appearing in documents that required a broad sweep of all chattels belonging to a person, estate, or business. It carries no precise technical boundary between its two components; rather, "goods" and "merchandize" were joined as a doublet to ensure comprehensive coverage, a common drafting habit in historical legal writing.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Goods" refers to tangible, movable items, especially products available for sale or trade. "Merchandise" refers specifically to commodities bought and sold in commerce; stock in trade.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Goods" encompassed movable property generally, including household belongings and personal effects. "Merchandise" was defined as the objects of commerce — things bought and sold by merchants.
The gap between common and legal meaning is subtle but real. In everyday usage, "merchandise" implies commercial goods — things actively traded. In legal usage, the phrase goods and merchandize operated as a unified term of art covering all personal property, not merely stock in trade. A debtor's household furniture, tools, livestock, and clothing fell within the phrase just as readily as a merchant's warehouse inventory. Researchers reading the phrase in a historical instrument should resist the modern commercial narrowing of "merchandise" and treat the doublet as equivalent to personal property broadly.
Common Confusion
Goods and merchandize should not be read as limiting the scope of a document to commercial inventory. The phrase was a comprehensive drafting formula. Similarly, it should not be conflated with the narrower modern commercial-law term "goods" as defined under the Uniform Commercial Code, which has a specific, bounded meaning in sales and secured-transactions law. The historical phrase is broader and less precise than either modern counterpart.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early American, colonial, or English legal records — wills, inventories, sheriffs' writs, bills of sale, bankruptcy schedules, and pleadings in debt or detinue — will encounter this phrase frequently. Several navigational points:
First, the phrase is a doublet of convenience, not a term with two distinct legal components. Historical drafters piled synonyms to avoid later argument over coverage. Do not read a distinction between "goods" and "merchandize" where none was intended.
Second, the phrase appears almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century sources. As legal drafting modernized, it was displaced by "personal property," "chattels," or the UCC's defined term "goods." Its presence is therefore a reliable indicator of the age and jurisdiction of a document.
Third, when this phrase appears in a historical pleading or writ, it signals that the drafter intended to capture the full range of a party's movable property. Arguments that a particular asset fell outside the phrase's scope were generally disfavored.
Fourth, in estate inventories and probate records — a common source type in historical legal research — the phrase frequently heads a schedule of assets. Understanding it as a collective descriptor, rather than a category limited to tradeable stock, is essential to interpreting the scope of the inventory.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source with an entry for this phrase. Burrill's treatment is concise: he gives the Latin equivalent (bona et merchandise), identifies the phrase as designating personal property, and supports the entry with a citation to Vaughan's Reports at page 170. This is consistent with the phrase's function in practice — a comprehensive descriptor rather than a term requiring extended technical definition.
No other standard historical law dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus (Bouvier, Black's early editions, Tomlin's) carry a dedicated entry for the phrase as a unit, though each addresses "goods" and "merchandise" separately. The absence of fuller treatment across the shelf reflects the phrase's nature: it was a drafting convention, not a doctrine, and generated little need for interpretive commentary beyond acknowledging its broad scope.
What the historical sources collectively miss is any discussion of edge cases — whether, for instance, choses in action, negotiable instruments, or debts owed to a party fell within "goods and merchandize." On this question, the phrase's Latin equivalent (bona et merchandise) is instructive: bona in Roman and civil law usage encompassed property broadly, but the common-law application in contexts like execution of judgments typically limited the phrase to tangible moveables, excluding intangible rights.