Definition
The act of trafficking at fairs and markets; any buying and selling. In legal usage, nundination referred broadly to commercial exchange, particularly trade conducted at public markets or fairs. The term carried no specialized technical meaning beyond this general commercial sense but appeared in contexts where such trade was subject to regulation, restriction, or prohibition — most notably in ecclesiastical law, where "common nundination" described the buying and selling of spiritual things (simony) or the trafficking of pardons and indulgences.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Traffic at fairs; buying and selling.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Traffic at fairs; marketing; buying and selling. Marked as obsolete. Webster's quotes Archbishop Bramhall: "Common nundination of pardons."
The gap between common and legal usage here is narrow but worth noting. In ordinary historical English, nundination described legitimate market trade. In legal and ecclesiastical contexts, the term often appeared in a pejorative register — describing illicit or impermissible commerce, particularly the selling of things that law or church doctrine held should not be sold. A researcher encountering the term in a legal source should consider whether the author intends neutral market trade or is invoking the concept critically.
Why It Matters in Research
Nundination is a term researchers are unlikely to encounter in modern legal materials. Its significance in the Law Mind corpus is almost entirely historical. Several research considerations apply:
First, jurisdiction and context matter more than usual for this term. Appearances in ecclesiastical records or canon law sources will carry the pejorative connotation — nundination of pardons, benefices, or sacraments — essentially functioning as a synonym for simony or corrupt trafficking in sacred things. Appearances in early commercial or market regulation sources will carry the neutral meaning of ordinary trade at fairs.
Second, the term's obsolescence is documented even in the 19th century. Webster's 1913 marks it as obsolete. Researchers should treat it as a term of art confined to historical materials and not assume continuity with any modern commercial law concept.
Third, nundination connects to a broader cluster of historical market law concepts — market overt, fair, toll, stallage — that governed the regulation of trade at designated public venues. If you encounter nundination in a source dealing with market privileges or borough charters, it is operating in this regulatory context rather than any moral or ecclesiastical one.
Fourth, the historical dictionaries embed nundination entries alongside unrelated Latin maxims (Nunquam crescit ex postfacto, Nunquam decurritur ad extraordinarium) due to alphabetical proximity. This is an artifact of dictionary layout and not a signal of substantive connection. Researchers working from scanned or OCR-processed versions of Black's should be alert to this structural quirk when parsing surrounding text.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence agree precisely on the core definition: "traffic at fairs and markets; any buying and selling." There is no divergence among the shelf sources on meaning, and none attempts an elaboration beyond this baseline. The brevity of treatment across all three sources is itself informative — nundination was included for completeness as a term appearing in older legal texts, not because it carried contested or evolving legal significance.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the ecclesiastical application of the term. The moral and canonical dimension — nundination as a descriptor of simony or the corrupt sale of spiritual goods — is absent from all three entries. Researchers encountering the term in church court records, canon law treatises, or Reformation-era polemics will find the dictionary shelf an insufficient guide and should look to ecclesiastical law sources directly.
None of the historical sources flags the term as obsolete, though by the time Black's first edition appeared the word had already fallen from active legal use.
Jurisdictional Note
Nundination has no meaningful modern jurisdictional variation, having passed out of active legal use in both common law and civil law systems. Historical variation existed between ecclesiastical and secular legal contexts, and between jurisdictions with formally chartered market systems (where nundination appeared in regulatory frameworks) and those without. English sources will predominate in the Law Mind corpus for this term.