Definition
A customary fine payable by a copyhold tenant in English feudal land tenure, due upon the death of the lord of the manor. The gressume was not a voluntary payment but an incident of copyhold tenure — a legal obligation arising automatically from the tenant-lord relationship when the lord died. Also spelled grassum and grossome; Rapalje & Lawrence cross-references the variant form grasson.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the dense vocabulary of English copyhold tenure and will appear primarily in historical English land records, manor court rolls, and treatises on real property law predating the Law of Property Act 1922, which effectively abolished copyhold tenure in England. Researchers will rarely encounter gressume in American sources because copyhold tenure was never transplanted to the American colonies in operative form; its appearance in American legal dictionaries is purely for reference to English authorities.
The key research trap is variant spelling. The same fine appears in historical sources as gressume, grassum, grossome, and grasson — and a corpus search limited to one spelling will miss most instances. Searching across all variants is essential when working with manor court records, conveyancing treatises, or early English property law commentaries.
Temporal framing matters: the gressume is a pre-modern English land law concept. Sources after the early twentieth century will reference it only historically. Its natural habitat in the Law Mind corpus is English property law treatises, copyhold tenure materials, and historical land law scholarship — not modern case law or statutory commentary.
The distinction between a gressume (due on the lord's death) and other copyhold fines (such as those due on the tenant's death or on alienation) is functionally important when reading historical property documents. Copyhold tenure generated multiple species of fines triggered by different events; conflating them produces misreadings of historical instruments.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in close agreement on substance, which itself signals that this is a narrow, settled historical term rather than a contested legal concept. Black's first and second editions provide the core definition — a customary fine due from a copyhold tenant on the death of the lord — and cite 1 Strange 654 and Crabb's Real Property (p. 615, § 778) as supporting authority. Rapalje & Lawrence economically redirect the reader to the variant form grasson without independent elaboration.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is contextual depth: they do not explain the mechanism by which the fine was assessed, whether it was fixed or variable, or how it related to other incidents of copyhold tenure. Crabb's Real Property, cited by Black's, would be the next research step for anyone needing that level of detail. The Strange citation points to eighteenth-century English case law that would similarly illuminate how courts treated disputes over these fines.
The existence of at least four variant spellings — none of which the dictionaries fully reconcile — is itself historically significant and reflects the oral, local, and informal character of manor court practice from which copyhold law developed.
Jurisdictional Note
Gressume is exclusively an English law concept. American jurisdictions did not adopt copyhold tenure, and the term has no operative meaning in U.S. property law. Research use in an American context is limited to comparative, historical, or conflict-of-laws contexts involving English land titles predating American independence.