Definition
A fee paid at fairs or markets for the privilege of breaking ground to erect booths, stalls, or temporary structures. The payment was made to the lord or authority holding the fair franchise in exchange for the right to dig, stake, or otherwise disturb the ground surface when setting up a trading pitch.
Piccage belongs to a cluster of customary market tolls that attached to the holding of fairs and markets in medieval and early modern England. These tolls were incidents of the fair franchise itself — a grant from the Crown or a lord — and piccage specifically compensated for the physical disturbance of the ground rather than for the right to trade (which was covered by separate toll obligations).
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Money paid at fairs for permission to set up booths.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Money paid at fairs for leave to break ground for booths.
The common definitions capture the essential idea accurately, but they omit the legal dimension that matters for research: piccage was not merely a practical fee but a legally recognized incident of a fair franchise. Its collection was a right that could be claimed, disputed, contested in court, and recorded in legal instruments. The common definitions describe what was paid; the legal definition locates piccage within the framework of franchise law, manorial custom, and toll entitlement.
Common Confusion
Piccage and stallage appear together so frequently in historical fair records and legal instruments that they are often treated as interchangeable. They are not. Piccage is specifically tied to the act of breaking or piercing the ground — the physical disturbance caused when posts are driven, pegs are set, or earth is otherwise disturbed to anchor temporary structures. Stallage is the broader right to maintain a stall or booth in the fair space. A stallholder might owe both: piccage when first setting up, stallage for the duration. Researchers encountering either term in historical records should check whether the instrument distinguishes between them or lumps them together, as practice varied by fair and period.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Piccage is typically encountered as a single, undivided toll obligation. It is, however, one member of a recognized cluster of fair and market tolls, which collectively included:
- TOLL: General payment for the right to buy and sell.
- STALLAGE: Payment for the right to erect a stall or stand (distinct from piccage in that stallage addressed the stall's presence, piccage addressed the ground disturbance necessary to set it up).
- PAVAGE: Payment toward the maintenance or construction of paved surfaces.
- LASTAGE: Payment based on the weight or measure of goods.
Piccage and stallage are the two most frequently conflated. In some sources they are treated as overlapping or synonymous; in others they are sharply distinguished. The distinction turns on whether the fee is characterized as compensation for ground disturbance (piccage) or for occupation of a designated standing place (stallage).
Why It Matters in Research
Piccage is a term of narrow historical application. It does not appear in modern commercial, property, or municipal law contexts. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in:
1. Records of fair franchises, particularly grants, confirmations, and disputes concerning the scope of toll rights. Because fair franchises were valuable property interests, litigation over which tolls were legitimately claimable was not uncommon, and piccage appears in such records as one enumerated toll among several.
2. Manorial court rolls and accounts, where the collection of market and fair tolls was recorded as an incident of manorial income.
3. Legal treatises and dictionaries from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries that catalogued the vocabulary of English customary and franchise law — Cowell's Interpreter and Spelman's Glossarium being the primary sources Burrill draws on for this term.
The key navigational trap is assuming piccage and stallage are synonyms. In some historical documents they are used loosely or interchangeably; in others they are separately itemized, with distinct rates and payers. A researcher analyzing a toll dispute or a fair franchise grant should treat them as potentially distinct unless the document itself conflates them.
There is no meaningful modern statutory or common law survival of piccage as a legal concept. Its relevance is entirely historical and archival.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary derives its entry directly from Cowell and Spelman, the two standard glossators of English legal antiquities. This is the expected lineage for a term of this type: Cowell's Interpreter (1607) and Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum (posthumously published 1664) were the authoritative sources for obsolete English legal vocabulary, and later dictionaries — including Burrill — largely transmitted their definitions rather than developing independent analysis.
Burrill's etymological note (from the French piquer, to pierce or pick) is consistent with the operational meaning: piccage is compensation for the piercing or breaking of ground. Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary both align with this core meaning, confirming that the term's plain sense was stable and uncontroversial across sources.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the legal machinery surrounding the right to collect piccage: how the entitlement was established, how disputes were adjudicated, what evidence was required to prove a customary right to collect it. For those questions, researchers must move beyond dictionary sources into treatises on franchise law and the records of fair courts and common law proceedings.
The fragment appearing in Burrill's source material referencing pignus (pledge) is an artifact of the source text's layout and belongs to a separate entry on pledge; it has no bearing on piccage.
Jurisdictional Note
Piccage is a term of English legal history with no recognized parallel in American law. It does not appear as a live legal concept in any U.S. jurisdiction. Researchers encountering the term in American contexts will find it only in historical dictionaries or in works discussing English common law antecedents.