Definition
A Latin phrase from medieval English feudal law meaning "to have the free disposal of an heiress in marriage." The phrase describes the right — held by a feudal lord or guardian — to arrange, control, or grant the marriage of a female ward or heiress who held land by feudal tenure. Possession of this right was a significant incident of feudal wardship: the person who held maritagium habere could direct whom an heiress married, and could profit from that power either by arranging an advantageous match or by collecting a fine if the heiress married without consent.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost exclusively to the historical literature of English feudal land tenure. Researchers will encounter it in medieval records, Year Books, early equity proceedings, and treatises on tenure such as Littleton's Tenures and Coke's commentary upon it. It does not survive as an operative legal concept in modern law.
Two research traps apply. First, maritagium habere should not be confused with maritagium standing alone. Maritagium (the marriage portion or maritagium itself) refers to the land or property settled on a bride at marriage — a distinct concept concerning the gift, not the right of disposal. Researchers moving between Latin-law sources must watch context carefully to determine which meaning is in play.
Second, the right described by this phrase was not a mere formality. Under the feudal incidents of wardship and marriage, the lord's right to the ward's marriage was a valuable property right that could be sold, litigated over, and pleaded in court. Actions involving maritagium habere appear in the common law records in connection with writs of ravishment of ward and related process, which provide a practical entry point for archival researchers tracing a specific dispute.
Jurisdictional variants are minimal because the concept belongs to a closed historical system, but researchers working in Scottish legal history should note that Scots feudal law developed cognate but not identical rules around wardship and marriage, and the Latin terminology may carry slightly different weight in Scottish sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries define the phrase identically: "to have the free disposal of an heiress in marriage." This uniformity reflects the phrase's status as a fixed technical expression with a settled, narrow meaning — there was no room for interpretive variation. Bouvier and Black offer no elaboration beyond the core gloss.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is notable for an apparent textual artifact: the entry bleeds into material about marital coercion and the marital portion in Louisiana law, which are unrelated concepts beginning with "marit-" that appear to have been run together in the source typesetting. Researchers consulting the original Rapalje & Lawrence volume should be aware of this and not read those fragments as qualifying or modifying the definition of maritagium habere.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural context: how the right was claimed, lost, or litigated. For that, researchers must go beyond the dictionary shelf to the feudal tenure literature and to the records of the common law courts.
Jurisdictional Note
Maritagium habere is a concept of English feudal common law. The feudal incidents of wardship and marriage were formally abolished in England by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660. The phrase has no operative significance in any modern common law jurisdiction and will not appear in contemporary statutes or case law except in historical context.