Definition
An abolished English duty levied on cloth manufacturers. Measuring money was a charge exacted by certain persons holding letters patent, imposed on every piece of cloth produced, separate from and in addition to alnage. Alnage was the official measurement and inspection fee for woolen cloth; measuring money was a distinct, additional impost collected under royal grant. Both charges fell on the cloth trade and were ultimately abolished as part of broader reforms to textile regulation.
Common Confusion
Measuring money is easily conflated with alnage, and historical sources sometimes treat them as synonymous. They were not. Alnage was the Crown's official fee for measuring and sealing cloth to certify its dimensions and quality, administered through the office of the alnager. Measuring money was a separate duty, collected by private patentees under letters patent, layered on top of alnage. A researcher who reads a historical complaint about cloth duties may encounter both charges in the same document without a clear signal that two distinct obligations are being described.
Why It Matters in Research
Measuring money is a term almost exclusively relevant to researchers working in pre-modern English commercial, regulatory, or revenue law — roughly the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Several research traps apply.
First, the term does not survive into modern law in any jurisdiction. It will not appear in contemporary statutory materials, treatises, or case law. Any researcher who encounters it is working in historical sources, almost certainly English.
Second, the letters patent mechanism is significant. Measuring money was not a parliamentary tax but a prerogative revenue device: the Crown granted private individuals the right to collect it. This places the term within the broader context of monopoly patents and prerogative revenue, a politically contested area of English constitutional history. Disputes over such patents were a recurring source of conflict between the Crown and Parliament and between patentees and the cloth trade. Researchers working on the history of commercial regulation, monopoly, or parliamentary sovereignty may encounter measuring money as one example among several contested patent-based duties.
Third, because alnage and measuring money were often addressed together in reform efforts, abolition statutes and petitions may refer to both. Treating them as interchangeable when reading such documents will distort the legal picture.
Fourth, Rapalje & Lawrence's entry cross-references Wharton as the authority, which signals that the definition was largely settled by the nineteenth century and repeated without much independent analysis. No significant doctrinal development or litigation history appears to surround this term.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence — give substantially identical definitions. Each describes measuring money as a duty exacted by letters patent on every piece of cloth made, distinct from alnage, and each notes that it has been abolished. Black's adds no elaboration beyond the core definition. Rapalje & Lawrence cites Wharton as the underlying authority, confirming that the entry follows the standard nineteenth-century lexicographic tradition of condensing Wharton without independent analysis.
No source offers legislative history, the date or mechanism of abolition, or any case law surrounding the duty. The historical dictionaries treat this as a closed, historical item — something worth defining for completeness but no longer legally operative. Researchers should not expect any of these sources to provide guidance on the duty's administration, enforcement, or the identity of typical patentees. Primary English sources — letters patent themselves, parliamentary petitions, cloth trade records, or statutes addressing textile regulation — would be necessary for substantive research.