Definition
The law of the staple is the body of commercial law administered in the courts of the staple — designated English towns (and later certain foreign trading centers) where merchants were required by royal authority to bring specified commodities for sale and export. The mayor of the staple presided over a specialized court with jurisdiction over disputes among merchants trading those commodities, applying a form of the law merchant rather than the common law of the king's ordinary courts. The law of the staple is therefore a historical subset or local application of the broader law merchant, adapted to the regulated commodity trade of medieval and early modern England.
Common Confusion
LAW OF THE STAPLE vs. LAW MERCHANT: These terms are closely related but not identical. The law merchant (lex mercatoria) was the broad body of commercial custom applicable to merchants generally across Europe. The law of the staple was the specific instantiation of that law as administered in the staple courts, with jurisdiction limited to staple towns and staple commodities. Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence treat the two as functionally equivalent by cross-reference, which can mislead researchers into treating them as synonyms. In practice, all law of the staple was law merchant, but not all law merchant was law of the staple.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs firmly to the historical record. No modern court administers a law of the staple, and no modern statute preserves it as operative doctrine. Researchers encounter the term in three contexts: (1) medieval and early modern English legal history, particularly studies of the staple towns established by statutes such as the Statute of the Staple (27 Edw. III, st. 2, 1353); (2) the history of the law merchant and its absorption into English common law; and (3) the history of specialized commercial courts that predated the development of modern commercial jurisdiction.
The primary navigational trap is the cross-reference. Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence both direct readers to "See" entries that, in the corpus, lead to law merchant — researchers who follow only one thread may miss that the staple court had its own procedural and jurisdictional character distinct from other merchant courts such as piepowder courts or the admiralty.
A secondary trap involves the language of pleading in staple courts. Burrill's entry — though the surviving text in the source material is fragmentary and drifts into a discussion of Norman French in English courts — points toward the linguistic and procedural context in which these courts operated. Staple courts applied law merchant principles through procedures that differed from common law pleading, and historical sources do not always clearly separate the substantive rules from the procedural setting.
Researchers working on the genealogy of commercial law, the development of negotiable instruments, or the history of arbitration among merchants will find the law of the staple a useful early data point, but should not expect the historical dictionaries to provide granular doctrinal analysis. The entries are thin precisely because, by the time the major legal dictionaries were compiled, the staple courts had long ceased to function as living institutions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in full agreement: both define the law of the staple as the law administered in the court of the mayor of the staple, equate it with the law merchant, and cite Coke's Institutes (4 Inst. 235) as the authoritative source. The convergence on a single citation suggests that both entries derive from the same root and should not be read as independent corroboration.
Burrill's Law Dictionary, as preserved in the corpus, does not yield a usable definition for this term — the surviving text pivots to a discussion of Norman French pleading, likely a transcription or pagination artifact. Burrill therefore adds no substantive support here, though his broader entries on law merchant and staple provide useful context if consulted directly.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: they do not address the statutory framework that established and regulated the staples, the geographic scope of staple jurisdiction (which extended to certain Calais and Low Countries trading posts as well as domestic towns), or the eventual fate of the staple courts as common law courts expanded their commercial jurisdiction. For that analysis, researchers must go beyond the dictionary shelf to Coke himself, to Holdsworth's History of English Law, or to scholarship on the medieval law merchant.
Jurisdictional Note
The law of the staple was an English institution with no direct counterpart in American law. American legal development bypassed the staple system entirely, inheriting instead the broader law merchant tradition through common law reception. The term appears in American legal dictionaries for historical completeness, not because it ever had operative force in American courts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Law Merchant; Staple (Commercial History); Medieval Commercial Courts