Definition
Jaques is an archaic term from old English law referring to small money — that is, coins of low denomination or minor currency. The term appears in historical legal and commercial contexts where distinctions between large and small coin were legally significant, such as in the payment of debts, fines, tolls, or customary dues.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Jaques is not recognized as a common English word. It functions primarily as a proper name (a French form of James) or as a literary allusion, most famously to the melancholy character in Shakespeare's As You Like It.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as a common English word. Webster's 1913 does not carry an entry for jaques as a monetary or legal term.
The gap here is notable: the legal term jaques has no meaningful foothold in ordinary English usage, historical or modern. Researchers encountering it in a document will find no intuitive common-language anchor. It must be treated as pure legal and commercial vocabulary of the medieval English period.
Why It Matters in Research
Jaques is the kind of term that trips up researchers working in early English legal records, manorial documents, customs rolls, or plea rolls. Its appearance in a source indicates a document of considerable antiquity — the term belongs to the medieval or early modern period and had fallen out of active legal use well before the systematic compilation of modern law dictionaries.
Key research traps:
First, do not confuse the term with the proper name Jacques or with Shakespearean literary usage. When jaques appears in a legal manuscript context, it signals a monetary reference, not a personal name.
Second, the precise denomination or legal value of jaques varied by period and locality. The term does not map cleanly onto a fixed modern equivalent. Researchers working in manorial or feudal records should consult specialized numismatic and economic history sources alongside legal dictionaries to establish the practical significance of the term in a given document.
Third, both editions of Black's Law Dictionary provide only the briefest gloss — "small money" — with no elaboration, citation, or illustrative context. This entry is a placeholder in the modern legal dictionary tradition, preserved for completeness rather than practical utility. Researchers should treat Black's as a first pointer only and follow through to primary historical sources and specialized medieval legal lexicons.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary — the first and second — carry identical one-line entries: "In old English law. Small money." There is no divergence between the editions, no illustrative case, and no treatise citation. This uniformity across editions reflects not a stable and well-documented legal concept but rather a copied placeholder entry of minimal depth.
The historical dictionary record for jaques is thin by any measure. The term does not appear to have attracted substantial treatment in the major legal dictionaries of the English tradition, which suggests it was already a curiosity — a recovered archaism — by the time systematic legal lexicography developed in the nineteenth century. Researchers should not expect richer treatment in contemporaneous sources such as Bouvier's Law Dictionary or Tomlin's Law Dictionary without independent verification.
For substantive historical treatment, the more productive path is through works on medieval English monetary history, numismatic scholarship, and specialized glossaries of early English legal and administrative vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
Jaques is a term of old English law specifically. It has no recognized counterpart or usage in American law, Scottish law, or other common law jurisdictions. Researchers encountering the term will be working exclusively in English historical legal materials.