Definition
Market geld is a historical English legal term for the toll or payment levied in connection with a market. In medieval and early modern English law, a market geld was the customary fee collected from merchants and traders for the privilege of buying and selling within a licensed market — typically a market operating under a royal grant or charter. The term appears in records of manorial rights and franchise law, where lords or other grantees holding market rights were entitled to collect such tolls as an incident of that franchise.
Why It Matters in Research
Market geld is nearly extinct as a working legal term; researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical sources — manor rolls, plea rolls, charters, and treatises on ancient English tenures and franchises from roughly the twelfth through seventeenth centuries. A few points of navigational importance:
First, market geld belongs to the broader cluster of Anglo-Norman and Old English fiscal terms (geldum, geld, toll, tallage, pontage, stallage, etc.) used to describe various market-related levies. Researchers working in medieval sources must distinguish market geld from stallage (a payment for a market stall), piccage (payment for breaking ground to pitch a stall), and tolls collected at fairs versus at weekly markets. These terms are frequently run together in secondary literature and occasionally in the primary sources themselves.
Second, the right to collect market geld was inseparable from the franchise right to hold a market. Because such rights descended from royal grant and were enforceable in the common-law courts (by writ of quo warranto, among others), disputes over market geld appear in franchise litigation well into the post-medieval period. If you are tracing a dispute over market rights in Chancery or common-law records, market geld may appear as a specific component of the franchise being contested.
Third, the term has no practical significance in modern Anglo-American commercial or property law. The Law Mind corpus entries most adjacent to this term — marketable title, FERC electricity markets, UCC market price damages — share the word "market" but are analytically unrelated. Do not allow modern market-law entries to color research into the historical franchise context where market geld properly lives.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement, both defining market geld identically as "the toll of a market." This brevity is itself informative: both dictionaries treat the term as a fossil of English feudal and franchise law requiring no further elaboration for a practicing legal audience, which signals that by the late nineteenth century the term had no live practical application.
Neither source situates market geld within the broader framework of market franchise law, nor do they distinguish it from closely related toll concepts. Researchers who need substantive context should consult older treatises on English law — particularly works on manorial customs, ancient tenures, and franchise rights — rather than relying on the terse dictionary entries alone. Coke's commentary on Littleton and works such as Kitchin's Court Leet and Court Baron provide richer context for the toll structure of medieval English markets.
Jurisdictional Note
Market geld is exclusively an English legal concept rooted in the common law of franchises and manorial tenure. It has no recognized counterpart in American law and did not transplant to the colonial legal system in any operative form. Researchers in American legal history will not encounter the term in domestic sources.