MERCIMOMATUS ANGLIE

Definition

Mercimomatus Anglie is a Latin phrase meaning "the impost of England upon merchandise" — a historical term for the customs duty or toll levied by the English crown on goods imported or exported through the realm. It denotes the royal prerogative to tax commerce, particularly trade in commodities passing through English ports or markets. The term belongs to the medieval and early modern legal vocabulary of fiscal administration and is not a term of art in contemporary law.

Why It Matters in Research

This term appears almost exclusively in Latin legal instruments, patent rolls, customs records, and writs from the medieval and early modern English administrative tradition. Researchers encountering it in primary sources should treat it as a marker for fiscal and trade documentation rather than a term with a continuing doctrinal life. It connects to the broader regime of royal prerogative over trade — the same domain occupied by terms like magna custuma (the great custom on wool, hides, and leather) and parva custuma (the petticoat custom on general merchandise). Historical sources rarely define it with precision; Bouvier treats it only in passing, essentially glossing it in a single phrase before moving on to an entirely separate entry on MERCY. This placement is a research trap: the Bouvier entry for Mercimomatus Anglie is extremely brief and immediately bleeds into the adjacent entry, so a researcher working from a printed or poorly digitized version may conflate the two or assume the definition is more developed than it is. Cross-referencing against Blount's Nomo-Lexicon or Cowell's Interpreter may yield more context than Bouvier provides here.

Historical Dictionary Support

Bouvier's Law Dictionary offers only a one-phrase gloss: "the impost of England upon merchandise." No further elaboration is given, and no statutory or case authority is cited in connection with this specific phrase. The entry is one of the shortest in Bouvier and appears to function primarily as a vocabulary note for Latin-reading practitioners encountering the term in older documents rather than as a working legal definition. No disagreement among historical dictionaries can be assessed here because no other dictionary in the Law Mind corpus carries an independent entry for this term. Its absence from Jacob's Law Dictionary (which Bouvier cites in the adjacent MERCY entry) and from later American treatises reflects its character as an archaic English administrative term with no transplanted meaning in American law. The term's importance is therefore historical and documentary rather than doctrinal.

Jurisdictional Note

Mercimomatus Anglie is a term of English origin with no recognized equivalent in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It is relevant only to English legal history and to the interpretation of medieval and early modern English fiscal documents.

Related Terms