Definition
A toll or fee paid at a fair for the privilege of breaking ground to erect a booth or stall. Pickage compensated the fair's lord or operator for the physical disturbance of the ground caused by vendors driving stakes or digging to set up temporary trading structures. It was a customary incident of fair-right, distinct from the toll charged on goods sold or brought to market.
Common Language
Wiktionary lists pickage as an alternative form of piccage, a word with no common modern meaning outside historical or legal contexts. Webster's 1913 does not carry a separate entry for pickage as a common English word. No meaningful gap between common and legal usage exists here — the term is effectively pure historical legal jargon with no divergent everyday meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
Pickage is a term a researcher will encounter almost exclusively in historical English sources dealing with the law of fairs, markets, and manorial rights. Several practical traps are worth noting.
First, spelling variation is significant. The term appears as pickage, piccage, and occasionally picage across historical records and secondary sources. A search limited to one spelling will miss relevant material. The Wiktionary cross-reference to piccage signals that piccage may be the more common spelling in some periods and sources.
Second, pickage is one of a cluster of fair and market tolls — including stallage, toll traverse, toll thorough, lastage, and pavage — that appear together in manorial grants, borough charters, and fair franchises. Researchers working with these documents need to distinguish among them. Pickage is specifically the ground-breaking fee; stallage is the fee for the stall itself once erected. The two are related but not identical, and historical documents sometimes conflate or bundle them.
Third, pickage belongs to the broader framework of franchise rights: it could only lawfully be levied by someone holding the appropriate grant from the Crown or a superior lord. This means disputes over pickage appear in records of quo warranto proceedings and franchise litigation, not merely in commercial or market records.
Fourth, the term has no meaningful modern survival as an active legal concept. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a historical marker pointing toward fair-franchise law, manorial custom, and the English common law of markets — a body of law that was substantially codified and transformed in the nineteenth century.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries give a nearly identical one-line definition: money paid at fairs for breaking ground for booths. This uniformity reflects the term's narrow and stable meaning rather than any independent synthesis by the compilers — they are all drawing on the same settled historical usage.
Rapalje & Lawrence is notable for placing the pickage entry immediately adjacent to entries for pickery (petty theft) and pignus (pledge), and for a partially reproduced entry on picketing by trade union members. This juxtaposition is an artifact of alphabetical arrangement, not legal relationship; researchers should not infer any doctrinal connection among these terms.
None of the source dictionaries elaborate on the franchise basis for pickage, its relationship to stallage, or the procedural mechanisms by which it was enforced or contested. For those dimensions, historical sources outside the law dictionaries — including treatises on the law of fairs and markets and Coke's commentary on franchise rights — provide the necessary context. The dictionary record on this term is, in short, accurate but thin.
Jurisdictional Note
Pickage is an English legal concept rooted in the common law of fairs and manorial franchise. It did not transplant meaningfully into American law, which largely bypassed the English fair-franchise system. Researchers working in American historical sources will rarely encounter the term.