Definition
In old English and feudal law, *mariage* (Law French, from *marier*, to marry) carried two distinct technical meanings, both arising from the lord-ward relationship under the feudal tenure system:
1. The lord's right of marriage (*maritagium*): The power held by a feudal lord to dispose of an infant ward in matrimony — that is, to arrange and consent to the ward's marriage, or to profit from the ward's refusal of a proposed match. This right was a recognized incident of wardship under knight-service tenure, enforceable against the ward until the ward reached legal majority.
2. Marriage portion: A sum of property or money settled upon a ward, or given with a ward, in connection with matrimony. Used in this sense, *mariage* functions as a near-synonym for *maritagium* in its property-conveyance meaning.
Both meanings are extinct in modern law. The term appears exclusively in historical sources dealing with feudal tenure, wardship, and the incidents of knight-service.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete spelling of *marriage*.
Historical common usage: Not separately defined in Webster's 1913; treated as a French-origin variant subsumed under *marriage*.
The gap here is not between common and legal meaning but between surface appearance and substantive content. A researcher encountering *mariage* in a medieval or early modern English legal document may read it as simply an archaic spelling of *marriage* — meaning the institution of matrimony itself — and miss entirely that the word is functioning as a technical feudal term describing a lord's proprietary right over a ward's matrimonial future, or a specific property settlement incident to that relationship. The two meanings are legally distinct: one is a power held by a superior, the other a property transfer event.
Common Confusion
MARIAGE vs. MARITAGIUM vs. MARRIAGE (institution): These three terms cluster in historical sources and are easily conflated.
— *Maritagium* is the Latin form used in formal pleading and in treatises such as Bracton; it covers both the lord's right and the marriage portion, and also extends to the broader concept of land given with a woman in marriage.
— *Mariage* is the Law French equivalent, used in records, year books, and older English legal writing.
— *Marriage* (the institution) is a separate concept entirely — the legal status created by the matrimonial union itself.
A researcher reading Britton or other Law French sources must resist the instinct to read *mariage* as the institutional concept. Context (especially references to wardship, lords, or portions) will usually signal the feudal meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records — year books, plea rolls, inquisitions post mortem, feudal surveys, and treatises like Britton — will encounter *mariage* as a live technical term. Its two meanings (the lord's right vs. the property portion) can shift within the same document, and conflation with the ordinary meaning of *marriage* will produce misreadings of tenure arrangements, wardship disputes, and property settlements.
The right of *mariage* was one of the enumerated profitable incidents of knight-service tenure. Its abuse — specifically, the lord's ability to impose a financially punitive fine when a ward refused a proposed match — was a longstanding grievance addressed (incompletely) by Magna Carta and later by the Statute of Merton. Researchers tracking the legislative history of wardship reform should note that statutory references to this right may appear under *mariage*, *maritagium*, or anglicized variants interchangeably.
The term effectively disappears from living legal use after the abolition of military tenures by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660, which eliminated the profitable incidents of knight-service including wardship and marriage. Sources dated after 1660 using this term are almost certainly quoting or glossing historical material.
Cross-corpus connection: *Mariage* as a marriage portion overlaps with *dos*, *dower*, and *maritagium* in property-settlement contexts. Researchers tracing the history of women's property rights will encounter this cluster in feudal and early common law sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source providing substantive coverage of this term in English legal lexicography. Burrill correctly identifies both meanings — the lord's right and the marriage portion — and cites Britton (chapters 67 and 103 respectively) and Kelham's *Norman-French Dictionary* as authorities. This is reliable and accurate as far as it goes.
What Burrill does not address: the relationship between *mariage* as a lord's right and the specific penalties attached to its exercise (the ward's obligation to pay a fine for refusing a suitable match without forfeiting inheritance rights), nor the statutory history of reform. Researchers needing that dimension should consult Bracton's *De Legibus* and Blackstone's *Commentaries* Book II (chapters on tenure and wardship), which treat the incidents of knight-service in fuller doctrinal detail using the Latin *maritagium*.
Kelham's citation is useful: his Norman-French glossary remains a standard reference for Law French terms in English legal sources and provides further variant spellings researchers may encounter in manuscript records.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English feudal law and its derivatives. It does not appear as a technical term in Scots law (which developed distinct feudal vocabulary) or in American law, where military tenures were never received. Researchers in colonial American property records may encounter *maritagium* in settlement documents derived from English forms, but *mariage* in its feudal sense has no American legal career.