Definition
Pount is an obsolete Law French term meaning a bridge. Derived from the Latin *pons*, it appears in early English legal records and treatises where bridges were subjects of legal obligation, jurisdiction, and taxation. The term is encountered primarily in medieval and early common law sources and carries no independent legal significance in modern practice.
Two related forms appear in the historical record:
1. POUNTZ — The plural form, meaning bridges. Used in the same early English legal literature to refer to multiple bridge structures subject to legal duty or repair obligation.
2. POUNTAGE — A toll or tax levied upon persons for the repair and maintenance of bridges. Functionally equivalent to pontage, the better-known Latin-derived term for the same exaction. Pountage was among the variety of local tolls recognized in medieval English law as a legitimate imposition on those who used or benefited from bridge infrastructure.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recorded as a current English word. The term is archaic and does not appear in modern general dictionaries.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded. The term had already passed out of general use well before the nineteenth century.
The gap here is not between legal and common meaning but between an extinct technical vocabulary and modern legal language entirely. Researchers encountering *pount* or *pountage* in historical sources should not attempt to map these terms onto modern equivalents without accounting for the medieval legal context in which bridge obligations were a distinct and enforceable category of local law.
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Common Confusion
POUNTAGE versus POUNDAGE: These terms are visually similar but legally unrelated. Poundage is a duty on merchandise, calculated as a rate per pound of value, with a long independent history in English customs law. Pountage is a bridge toll. Confusion between them in transcription and indexing is a documented hazard in older secondary literature. When working from manuscript or early printed sources, verify spelling carefully before classifying the underlying legal transaction.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records, early plea rolls, or the treatise literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries will encounter *pount*, *pountz*, and *pountage* in contexts involving local obligation and toll rights. Several navigational points are worth noting.
First, the term appears almost exclusively in Law French sources. Britton, the Anglo-French legal treatise from which Burrill draws his citations, is among the few English legal texts to use *pount* with any regularity. Researchers relying on Latin transcriptions of the same records will find *pons* and *pontagium* in corresponding positions — knowing both forms is essential to cross-referencing manuscript sources.
Second, *pountage* is easily confused with *poundage*, a completely distinct legal term referring to a customs duty on imports and exports calculated by value. The visual and phonetic similarity between *pountage* and *poundage* has caused transcription errors in secondary literature. A researcher encountering what appears to be a reference to a bridge toll in a customs or trade document should verify the underlying term carefully.
Third, bridge obligations in medieval English law were not merely fiscal. They were frequently tied to tenure — certain landholders bore a duty to repair specified bridges as a condition of their holding, enforceable through the king's courts. Sources using *pount* may therefore appear in contexts involving feudal service, presentment of nuisance, or eyre proceedings, not only in taxation records.
Fourth, the term has no continuing legal life. It does not appear in modern statutes, case law, or secondary legal literature. Its research value is purely historical and paleographic.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole major historical legal dictionary to give *pount* a discrete entry, and it does so concisely: the term is glossed as meaning bridge, with *pountz* as the plural and *pountage* as the associated toll. Burrill's citations to Britton (chapters 51 and 30 respectively) are the primary textual anchors. No other major historical legal dictionary — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions, not Tomlin's — appears to have treated *pount* as a headword, likely because by the time those works were compiled the term had been entirely displaced by its Latin equivalents and by the English word *bridge*.
The entry in Burrill serves principally as a glossary aid for readers of Law French sources rather than as a substantive legal definition. This is accurate to the term's function. *Pountage* as a concept — the bridge toll — had real legal substance, but by Burrill's era that substance was fully captured under *pontage*, leaving *pount* as a vocabulary fossil useful mainly for translation purposes.
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