Definition
An obsolete term from old English law referring to a bribe, reward, or illicit compensation — particularly a payment made in exchange for something where the value given and the value received were not equal. The term captures the idea of a payment used to "make up" a difference or secure an advantage improperly, functioning as what might today be called a corrupt inducement or unlawful gratuity.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current entry. The term has passed entirely out of ordinary English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded. The term does not appear to have survived into nineteenth-century general usage.
Editorial note: MEDFEE is pure archaic legal vocabulary with no meaningful foothold in common English at any period. Researchers encountering it in historical documents should treat it as a technical legal term of art, not a term whose ordinary meaning can supply interpretive guidance.
Common Confusion
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry introduces an adjacent phrase — MEDIÆ ET INFIRMÆ MANUS HOMINES, meaning "men of a middle and base condition" — immediately after the MEDFEE entry, with only a dash separating them. Researchers scanning historical dictionaries should not conflate these two entries. They are entirely distinct concepts: MEDFEE concerns a type of wrongful payment; MEDIÆ ET INFIRMÆ MANUS HOMINES is a social and legal classification of persons by status. The compressed formatting in Rapalje & Lawrence creates a real risk of misreading.
Why It Matters in Research
MEDFEE is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in one context: early English legal manuscripts, glossaries, and the secondary sources — Cowell's Interpreter chief among them — that preserved and transmitted archaic English legal vocabulary into the nineteenth-century dictionaries. It does not appear in modern statutes or case law, and no active legal doctrine flows from it.
The practical research value of MEDFEE lies in what it tells you about the document you are reading. If the term appears in a source, that source is either (1) a pre-modern English legal text, likely medieval or early modern; (2) a nineteenth-century dictionary or glossary entry descending from Cowell; or (3) a historical or antiquarian treatment of English law drawing on that line of sources. Its presence is thus a reliable signal about provenance and period.
Researchers working on the history of bribery, corruption, or illicit payment in English law should note that MEDFEE is one of several archaic terms — alongside BROCAGE and EMBRACERY, among others — that the old sources used to capture what we now address through bribery statutes, public corruption law, and fiduciary duty doctrine. None of these modern frameworks should be read back onto the historical term; the conceptual infrastructure was quite different.
Burrill's entry on MEDFEE is notable for appending a digression on the word "MEDALS" in wills — a sign that Burrill occasionally used dictionary entries as hooks for loosely related notes. Researchers using Burrill should be alert to this practice and not assume that every item appearing under a headword is definitionally connected to it.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries converge on the same core definition, and all trace the term to a single authority: John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), an early English law dictionary. The near-verbatim agreement across Black's (both editions) and Burrill reflects a common chain of descent from Cowell through the tradition of English legal lexicography, rather than independent verification.
Rapalje & Lawrence abbreviates slightly and adds the gloss "that which is given to boot," which usefully clarifies the "boot" or surplus-consideration sense — the idea that MEDFEE was specifically associated with an unequal exchange, not merely any bribe. This is a meaningful nuance: the term seems to have carried a specific connotation of compensating for disparity in an exchange, as distinct from a purely gratuitous corrupt payment. None of the modern dictionaries develop this distinction further, and historical sources do not provide enough usage examples to resolve it definitively.
What the historical dictionaries miss: none of them situate MEDFEE within the broader development of English anti-bribery law or connect it to the medieval statutes and common law doctrines that addressed corrupt payments. The entries are purely definitional and lexicographic, with no analytical context.
Jurisdictional Note
MEDFEE is specific to old English law and has no recognized equivalent in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It does not appear in American legal dictionaries as an operative term.