Definition
An archaic term appearing in old English records denoting the toll or custom duty paid on goods imported and exported, or equivalently, on goods bought in and sold out. "Intol" refers to the inward toll — the charge levied on goods brought into a market, town, or jurisdiction. "Uttol" (also rendered "outtol") refers to the outward toll — the corresponding charge on goods sent out. Together, the phrase captures a paired customs or market-toll regime: a duty assessed at both ends of a commercial transaction.
The terms belong to the vocabulary of medieval English fiscal and market law, where local lords, municipalities, and the Crown asserted the right to exact tolls as a condition of trade passing through or occurring within their jurisdiction.
Why It Matters in Research
Structural pattern: Historical evolution — this is a term encountered almost exclusively in primary sources of medieval and early modern English law and will rarely, if ever, appear in modern legal instruments.
Researchers are most likely to encounter "intol and uttol" in the following contexts:
— Manor rolls and borough charters, where lords claimed toll rights as incidents of their franchise.
— Pipe rolls and Exchequer records documenting Crown revenues from market towns.
— Quo warranto proceedings, where franchise holders were required to demonstrate the legal basis for toll collection.
— Historical treatises on English market law and borough customs.
The key navigational trap is this: the terms are orthographically unstable across historical records. Variant spellings include "intoll," "outtoll," "uttoll," and the Latinized forms used in medieval documents. A search confined to a single spelling will miss cognate entries. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should run variant-form searches before concluding that a source is silent on the subject.
The terms also carry a jurisdictional specificity that is easy to overlook. Intol and uttol were not uniform Crown taxes but local franchise rights. Their scope, rate, and legal basis varied by grant and by custom. A manor holding intol and uttol by royal grant occupied a different legal position than one claiming the right by immemorial custom — a distinction that mattered acutely in quo warranto litigation.
The term has no meaningful survival in modern law. Its research value is almost entirely antiquarian and historical — but for researchers working on the history of English market regulation, franchise law, or local taxation, it is a precise and useful term of art.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's — are in complete agreement on the core definition: toll or custom paid for things imported and exported, or bought in and sold out. The uniformity is itself notable, suggesting the compilers drew from a common authority, which they identify consistently: Cowell's Interpreter (cited by Black's and Burrill's) and Calvini Lexicon Juridicum (cited by Bouvier's). Thomas Cowell's Interpreter (1607) is one of the earliest English legal dictionaries and a primary reference for archaic franchise terminology; its authority here is well-placed.
None of the historical dictionaries expand meaningfully beyond the bare definition. None discuss the distinction between toll by grant and toll by custom, none address the procedural contexts in which the term was litigated, and none flag the orthographic instability that complicates corpus searches. For substantive depth, researchers will need to move beyond the dictionary shelf to primary record sources and histories of English market law.
The truncation in Black's 2nd edition entry — where the definition trails off mid-sentence into the entry for INTOXICATION — is a typographic artifact of that edition's layout and has no legal significance.
Jurisdictional Note
Intol and uttol are terms of English law with no direct equivalent in American legal history. American colonial law occasionally adopted English market-toll concepts in early borough and town charters, but the specific vocabulary of intol and uttol did not transfer. Researchers working in early American sources should look instead to "toll," "market toll," and "wharfage" as the more common American cognates.