Definition
A kidder was a person who engrossed, or bought up in bulk, grain or corn with the intent to resell it at an inflated price. The term belongs to the cluster of historical English offenses against the grain and provisions trade, which included forestalling (intercepting goods before they reached market), regrating (buying and reselling in the same or nearby market), and engrossing (cornering supply to drive up price). A kidder operated as a species of engrosser, acquiring corn in quantity not for personal consumption or legitimate trade but to manipulate market price to the detriment of ordinary buyers. Some historical sources also use the term loosely to mean a huckster — a petty retailer or street dealer — though the grain-trade sense is the primary legal meaning.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A surname; the name of towns in Missouri and South Dakota. No commercial or trade meaning survives in ordinary modern English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry a standalone entry for "kidder" as a trade term, reflecting how thoroughly the word had dropped from living commercial usage by the nineteenth century.
The gap is near-total: in modern English the word is purely onomastic. The legal meaning — a grain engrosser who manipulates market price — has no surviving common-language trace, making the historical dictionaries the only practical guide to the term's substance.
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Common Confusion
KIDDER is easily conflated with three related offenses that the old English law treated as distinct:
- FORESTALLER: intercepts goods or the seller before goods arrive at market.
- REGRATER (REGRATOR): buys goods in a market and resells them in the same or a nearby market.
- ENGROSSER: buys up large quantities of provisions in the field or in bulk to monopolize supply.
A kidder fits most closely with the engrosser category, though secondary sources sometimes use kidder and huckster interchangeably for any petty reseller. Researchers should not assume these four terms are synonyms; they described different points of interference in the supply chain, each carrying its own common-law prohibition and, in some periods, its own statutory treatment.
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Why It Matters in Research
KIDDER is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in older English legal sources — primarily treatises, commentaries, and statutes from the medieval period through the eighteenth century dealing with the regulation of the grain and provisions trade. It rarely appears in American legal sources because the forestalling-regrating-engrossing framework never fully transplanted to the United States, and these offenses were substantially abolished or fell into disuse in England by the early nineteenth century.
Key research traps:
1. Inconsistent usage: Historical sources do not always draw a bright line between kidder, engrosser, huckster, and regrator. A source using "kidder" may mean any small-scale reseller, not necessarily a grain monopolist. Read the surrounding context carefully before treating the term as technically precise.
2. Statutory versus common-law treatment: The prohibition on engrossing and related offenses moved back and forth between common-law enforcement and statutory regulation across English legal history. When tracing the offense in corpus sources, distinguish between periods of statutory prohibition (with specific penalty structures) and periods when the conduct was treated as a common-law misdemeanor.
3. Obsolescence in American law: American legal dictionaries and treatises largely omit kidder, reflecting its non-adoption in U.S. law. If this term surfaces in an American source, it is likely either a direct quotation from an English authority or a term of art in an early colonial or state provision-trade regulation, not an independent American legal concept.
4. Huckster overlap: The second definition in Black's 2nd Ed. — "also a huckster" — opens into a separate research thread. Huckster carried its own legal and commercial meaning (a licensed petty retailer, often of provisions) and should be pursued separately if that is the sense in which the source uses "kidder."
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions agree on the core definition: an engrosser of corn who buys in bulk to enhance price. The second edition adds the huckster gloss, slightly broadening the term's scope. Neither edition provides depth on the historical legal framework, penalty structure, or the statutory genealogy of the offense — all of which require recourse to English treatise literature rather than the dictionary entries alone.
The brevity of both entries is itself informative: by the time these editions were published, kidder had no practical American legal significance. Black's preserves the term as a historical reference point rather than as working vocabulary. Researchers needing the full doctrinal context should look to English sources on the law of forestalling and engrossing, where the kidder fits within a larger regulatory scheme for the grain trade.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is exclusively English in origin and legal significance. It has no established place in American common law or statutory law. Researchers working in U.S. legal sources will not encounter it as operative legal vocabulary.
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