Definition
An archaic legal term with two distinct meanings in historical English law:
1. A dwelling house or messuage. Used primarily in older conveyancing and property documents as a Norman-French variant for a house or residential holding.
2. A customary measure of herrings. The quantity varied by locality: 500, 525, 612, or 615 fish depending on the port or trading custom of the region.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Primarily encountered today as a surname with no general common meaning.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A unit of count equal to five hundred, used in the context of herrings. Labeled provincial English.
The legal sources carry a meaning Webster's 1913 only partially captures. The fish-measure sense aligns, but Bouvier adds the property meaning entirely absent from common usage. A researcher encountering "mease" in a historical deed should not assume the fish-trade sense applies, nor vice versa — context of the document determines which meaning governs.
Common Confusion
MEASE and MESSUAGE are related but not interchangeable. Bouvier treats mease as a Norman-French form pointing toward messuage, but the two terms had independent use. Messuage is the more durable property-law term with an established legal definition in conveyancing practice. MEASE in its property sense appears as a variant or colloquial form and is not a precise synonym. In fish-trade contexts, MEASE has no connection to messuage at all.
MEASE should also be distinguished from MAZE and MESE, orthographic variants that appear in older manuscripts and may represent the same term under different scribal conventions.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a rare dual-meaning term that requires document-context to interpret correctly. Researchers working in historical English property records — particularly Norman-French influenced conveyancing documents, early common law pleadings, or manorial records — may encounter mease as a property descriptor. Do not modernize it to messuage without confirming the intended meaning; they are related but distinct.
In fish-trade records, port customs, market regulations, or commercial dispute records from English coastal jurisdictions, mease functions as a unit of measure. The quantity is not fixed: 500, 525, 612, or 615 fish are all historically attested figures. This local variability matters when quantity is at issue in a dispute. A contract or custom specifying "a mease of herrings" may have meant different things in different ports, and that ambiguity would have been a live question in any contemporaneous commercial litigation.
The term is effectively obsolete in modern legal usage. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in primary source transcription, historical legal dictionaries, or secondary scholarship on medieval and early modern English commercial or property law. It will not appear in modern statutes or case law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the principal legal dictionary source for this term and provides both meanings: the property sense (citing Wharton for the Norman-French derivation) and the herring-measure sense (citing Byrne for the quantity variants). Bouvier's treatment is brief but covers the essential ground.
Webster's 1913 captures only the fish-measure sense and treats it as provincial English usage, which is consistent with the term's limited geographic and professional circulation. The property meaning does not appear in Webster's at all, making Bouvier's the indispensable source for legal research purposes.
No major modern legal dictionary treats mease as a live term. Its appearance in Bouvier's reflects the dictionary's value as a repository of historical and Norman-French legal vocabulary that has otherwise dropped from practice.
Jurisdictional Note
Mease as a legal term is specific to historical English law and its Norman-French inheritance. It does not appear as a recognized term in American, Scottish, or civil law traditions. Researchers working in early American colonial records may encounter it in documents transplanted from English practice, but it carries no independent American legal history.