Definition
A feudal right, recognized in English law, by which a lord was entitled to lodge and be entertained at the houses of his tenants. The obligation fell on the tenant as an incident of tenure: the lord could demand hospitality — shelter, food, and accommodation — as a matter of right rather than charity. Hostellagium functioned as one of several feudal exactions that burdened land tenure beyond simple rent or military service, placing a personal hospitality obligation on the tenant in favor of his superior lord.
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Common Confusion
Hostellagium is sometimes loosely grouped with other lodging-related feudal rights, but it is distinct from purveyance (the crown's right to compel the sale of provisions and transport at fixed prices) and from the right of prise or prisage (a taking of goods for royal use). Where purveyance and prise operated primarily for the benefit of the Crown and were regulated or abolished by statute, hostellagium was a seigneurial right running between lord and tenant in the ordinary feudal hierarchy. Researchers conflating these terms risk misreading the scope of the lord's claim and the tenant's remedy.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is an archaic term of medieval English feudal law with no modern operational counterpart. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in:
- **Manorial records and medieval conveyances**, where hostellagium may appear as a reserved right in grants of land or in descriptions of seigneurial privileges attached to a manor.
- **Treatises on feudal tenure**, particularly works dealing with the incidents of villeinage, copyhold, and the various non-monetary obligations owed by tenants to lords.
- **Abolition and reform literature**, as many feudal incidents of this type were targeted by statutory reform from the Statute of Tenures (1660) onward in England, and researchers tracing the survival or extinguishment of such rights need to locate this term within that legislative history.
The practical danger in historical corpus research is that hostellagium may appear alongside terms of similar texture — *averagium* (carriage service), *chevage* (head money), *tallage* — and a researcher unfamiliar with the term may misread the character of the obligation. It describes hospitality as a legal duty enforceable by the lord, not a voluntary custom.
No modern jurisdiction recognizes or enforces hostellagium. Its appearance in primary sources is a reliable signal that the document dates to or deliberately invokes the medieval or early modern feudal period.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the sole historical dictionary source available for this entry and treats hostellagium with characteristic brevity: "A right reserved to the lords to be lodged and entertained in the houses of their tenants." This definition is accurate as far as it goes but provides no guidance on the mechanism of enforcement, the scope of the entertainment owed, or how the right was extinguished or modified over time.
Broader feudal law literature — including Coke's commentary on Littleton and treatments of copyhold tenure — contextualizes hostellagium within the larger system of feudal incidents, where tenants owed obligations in labor, kind, money, and hospitality as conditions of holding land. The right to hospitality was one of the more personal and potentially onerous of these obligations, since it created an open-ended claim on the tenant's household rather than a fixed payment.
Historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus do not substantially develop this term beyond Bouvier's entry. Researchers needing fuller treatment should look to specialized histories of English feudal tenure rather than legal dictionaries of the American tradition, which largely ignored hostellagium as having no application to American property law.
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Jurisdictional Note
Hostellagium was a right of English feudal law. It was not transplanted into American property law, and no American jurisdiction has recognized it. In England, the systematic abolition of feudal incidents — accelerating from 1660 and largely complete by the nineteenth century — extinguished rights of this character. Its relevance today is exclusively historical.
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