Definition
Hostalagium is a feudal right reserved by a lord entitling him to lodging and entertainment at the dwellings or inns of his tenants. Under this right, the lord could demand hospitality — shelter, food, and related accommodation — from tenants as an incident of their tenure, without payment or as part of an established customary obligation. The term appears in old English and continental records and belongs to the cluster of feudal service obligations that supplemented or substituted for monetary rent.
Common Confusion
Hostalagium is sometimes conflated with purveyance or the royal prerogative of prise, which were distinct rights of the Crown to requisition lodging, provisions, and transport. Hostalagium is a seigniorial right running between lord and tenant within a feudal tenure relationship, not a Crown prerogative exercised against subjects generally. The distinction matters in historical research because the legal basis, geographic scope, and mode of enforcement differed substantially between seigniorial hospitality rights and Crown purveyance.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter hostalagium almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English land records, estate surveys, manorial court rolls, and treatises on feudal tenure. It is a term of art from a legal world that had largely dissolved by the time systematic English law reporting was underway, which means it rarely appears in reported cases and is more likely to surface in documentary history, antiquarian legal writing, and treatises on feudal tenures such as those by Coke, Littleton, or Spelman.
Several navigational traps apply. First, the term is orthographically unstable in historical sources — variant spellings in Latin records include hostalagio, ostalagio, and related forms drawn from the Old French hostel. A researcher searching only for the exact spelling hostalagium will miss instances. Second, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry is compressed and slightly garbled in its surviving form, with the editorial note on hostels and the maxim on enemies appearing as run-on context from surrounding entries rather than as part of the hostalagium definition itself. Researchers should treat the Rapalje & Lawrence entry as a pointer, not a complete account. Third, the underlying right is connected to the broader system of castle-guard, cornage, and other non-monetary feudal services; understanding hostalagium requires familiarity with that surrounding framework.
Because hostalagium was effectively extinguished as a practical matter by the abolition of feudal tenures in England (completed by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660), it has no modern operative legal significance in common law jurisdictions. Its research value is historical and interpretive: it appears as evidence of tenure conditions in estate records, in disputes over ancient customary obligations, and in antiquarian commentary on the nature of feudal land holding.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define hostalagium as the right, reserved by lords in old records, to have lodging and entertainment in tenants' properties — rendered here as "eeper," which appears to be a typographical corruption of "hostel" or a similar term. The entry is brief and its surrounding text bleeds into the separate heading for Hostels (identifying the Inns of Court) and the Latin maxim Hostes sunt qui nobis vel quibus nos bellum decernimus, which is drawn from Coke's Reports and concerns the definition of public enemies as distinguished from traitors and pirates. These are distinct topics improperly run together in the source; researchers should not read the maxim as bearing on hostalagium.
No other source dictionaries were supplied for this entry. The term does not appear in Black's Law Dictionary in its commonly available modern editions, which reflects its status as a defunct feudal term of limited practical relevance to American or modern English law. Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum and Du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis are the authoritative lexicographic sources for this class of feudal terminology and would provide fuller treatment than any common law dictionary.
Jurisdictional Note
Hostalagium is a term of English feudal tenure law and does not appear in American law as an operative concept. It may surface in American legal history contexts when colonial or proprietary land grants were modeled on feudal tenure forms, but even then its practical application was minimal. Research use is confined to English legal history and medieval studies.