Definition
A measure or portion of grain (historically rendered as "corn" in the broad English sense of cereal grain, not maize) given by a lord of a manor to his customary tenants as a reward or incentive for labor and faithful service. Metecorn was a feature of the feudal manorial system, functioning as a kind of in-kind payment or bonus distributed alongside the obligations of customary tenure. It was not a right independently enforceable by tenants in the modern sense, but rather a customary practice recognized within the governance of particular manors.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "A quantity of corn formerly given out by the lord to his customary tenants, as encouragement or reward for their labour and/or service."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A quantity of corn formerly given by the lord to his customary tenants, as an encouragement to, or reward for, labor and faithful service."
The common and legal meanings here are essentially the same, reflecting the term's narrow historical character. The only meaningful distinction a researcher should register is the word "corn." In both historical common and legal usage, "corn" denotes cereal grain generally — wheat, rye, oats — not the American English sense of maize. Misreading "corn" as a specific crop rather than a category of grain is the principal interpretive hazard.
Why It Matters in Research
Metecorn is an archaic manorial law term with no living legal significance. Researchers encounter it almost exclusively in three contexts: (1) historical studies of English feudal tenure and manorial custom; (2) older English legal dictionaries and Cowell's Interpreter, which is the primary source cited by both editions of Black's; and (3) antiquarian treatments of villein and customary tenant obligations.
The term will not appear in modern case law or statutory materials. If it surfaces in a historical document — a court roll, a manorial survey, or a treatise predating the nineteenth century — it signals a provision governing the relationship between a lord and his customary (as opposed to freehold) tenants, and should be understood as an in-kind labor incentive, not a contractual wage or a legally cognizable entitlement in the contemporary sense.
Researchers working in early English agrarian or property history should note that the specific quantity of "metecorn" varied by manor and was governed by local custom rather than any uniform rule. It sits within a broader vocabulary of manorial in-kind obligations and distributions — alongside terms like boonwork, tallage, and villeinage — that describe the economic texture of customary tenure. Understanding metecorn in isolation, without that surrounding vocabulary, risks mischaracterizing the manorial relationship it reflects.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first edition and the Second Edition Supplemental) defines metecorn identically, tracing the definition to Cowell — that is, John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), one of the foundational English legal dictionaries. Both Black's entries are essentially restatements of Cowell without elaboration or case law support, which is consistent with the term's status as a historical curiosity rather than a litigated concept.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry reproduced in the source material does not address metecorn directly; the surrounding text concerns mesne process, mesne profits, and messuage — adjacent alphabetically but unrelated conceptually. This is a reminder that in historical dictionary research, proximity on the shelf is not proximity in meaning.
Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary align closely with the legal dictionary definitions, confirming that metecorn passed out of active use early enough that no divergence developed between legal and common understanding.
What historical sources do not address: there is no discussion in any of the source dictionaries of how disputes over metecorn were resolved, what quantities were customary, or how the practice interacted with the commutation of services that gradually transformed manorial obligations in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. For that context, researchers must look beyond legal dictionaries to agrarian history scholarship and primary manorial records.
Jurisdictional Note
Metecorn is an English manorial law concept with no recognized counterpart in American law. It has no jurisdictional variation in any operative sense because it ceased to function as a live legal category before American legal institutions were established.