Definition
Multures (singular: multure) are the tolls or dues payable to the owner or operator of a mill in exchange for the grinding of grain. Under the feudal milling system, tenants within a lord's domain were typically bound by an obligation known as thirlage or suit of mill — a compulsory duty to bring their grain to the lord's designated mill and to surrender a fixed portion of the grain or flour as payment for the service. That payment in kind was called multures.
The term encompasses both the obligation itself and the physical quantity of grain or meal taken as the toll. Multures could be levied as a fraction of the grain brought in (typically one-sixteenth to one-twenty-fourth of the quantity ground, though rates varied considerably by locality and custom), or occasionally as a money payment in lieu thereof.
Common Confusion
Multures should be distinguished from sequels (also termed sequelae), which were the related tolls owed not for the grinding itself but for the carriage or attendance of servants and animals in connection with mill service. Both arose under thirlage, and historical sources sometimes use the terms loosely, but sequels represented a secondary layer of obligation beyond the core grinding toll. In Scottish law, where the thirlage system persisted longest and was most elaborately developed, this distinction had practical legal significance in mill-right disputes.
Why It Matters in Research
Multures is primarily a term of Scottish and older English feudal law, and researchers should calibrate their source searches accordingly. The concept survived in Scottish legal practice well into the eighteenth and even early nineteenth century, long after it had become practically extinct in English law, which means that Scottish session records, heritable rights documents, and agricultural lease instruments are the richest sources. English common law sources largely abandoned detailed treatment of multures by the early modern period.
A key navigational trap: the term appears in two distinct research contexts that require different sources. First, as a property and feudal tenure matter, multures appear in treatises on heritable rights and Scottish feudal law — Erskine's Institute and Bell's Principles are the most cited authorities in that tradition. Second, multures appear in agricultural lease and copyhold disputes, where the question was whether the obligation ran with the land and bound successors. These are analytically different questions and drew on different bodies of doctrine.
Researchers in American sources will find multures effectively absent. The feudal milling obligation was not transplanted to the American colonies in any systematic way, and the term does not appear meaningfully in American case law or statutes. Any American reference is almost certainly historical or comparative in character.
In historical corpus searches, watch for spelling variants: multurs, multur, and moulture all appear in older Scottish and northern English records. The Latin form multura appears in medieval sources and in formal legal instruments.
Historical Dictionary Support
The source material attributed to Rapalje & Lawrence for this entry appears to be a cataloguing error — the text provided relates to "outward mark or show of business" and "outlawry," which are unrelated terms. No substantive entry for multures appears in the supplied Rapalje & Lawrence text.
That absence is itself informative. By the late nineteenth century, when Rapalje & Lawrence compiled their dictionary for an American legal audience, multures had so thoroughly receded from living legal practice that American legal lexicographers had little occasion to treat it. The term's primary documentary life is in Scottish legal authorities and in English treatises on feudal tenure and manorial law. Older English dictionaries of law — Cowell's Interpreter and Termes de la Ley — give brief entries, treating multures as a customary toll incident to suit of mill. Jacob's Law Dictionary and subsequent English dictionaries follow this general pattern without substantial elaboration.
The most developed legal treatment in the common law tradition appears in Scottish institutional writers. Erskine and Bell address multures in the context of thirlage as a real burden running with land, capable of registration and enforceable against singular successors. This doctrinal elaboration reflects Scotland's longer retention of feudal agricultural structures.
Jurisdictional Note
Multures as a living legal concept is almost exclusively Scottish and, to a lesser extent, northern English in historical application. It does not appear as an operative legal obligation in American or modern Commonwealth jurisdictions. Researchers encountering the term in a modern context are almost certainly dealing with historical analysis, property title chains, or academic treatment of feudal land law.