Definition
In old English law, a duty in money owed by a sheriff upon rendering his account in the exchequer, representing funds remaining in the sheriff's hands that had not been paid over or properly accounted for. The prest represented unresolved balances — amounts collected or held by the sheriff for which he remained personally liable until full account was made and the surplus discharged or justified.
The term also carries a broader historical sense as a loan or advance of money, particularly from the Crown to an officer or other person, creating a debt requiring repayment or accounting. In this usage, a prest was an anticipatory disbursement — money placed in someone's hands on the expectation that they would account for it.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To give as a loan; to lend.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Listed only as the past tense and past participle of "press."
The legal meaning intersects with the lending sense — a prest in fiscal administration was money advanced on account, creating an obligation to account or repay. However, the legal term is narrower and more specific: it denotes not just any loan but a formal fiscal obligation arising in the context of Crown accounting, particularly the sheriff's account before the exchequer. A researcher encountering "prest" in legal records should not read it as a casual loan but as a term of art in public financial administration.
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Why It Matters in Research
PREST is an archaic term appearing almost exclusively in pre-modern English fiscal and administrative records, particularly exchequer rolls, pipe rolls, and accounts of royal officers. Researchers working in early English legal history or examining the administrative machinery of the medieval and early modern Crown will encounter it in contexts that require understanding its technical meaning.
The term's ambiguity is a research trap: because prest can mean either a liability owed by the sheriff (money unaccounted for) or an advance made by the Crown to an officer, the direction of the obligation differs depending on context. In exchequer accounting, a prest against the sheriff's name typically indicated a deficit — an amount he was still on the hook for. In disbursement records, a prest might indicate the Crown had paid out in advance.
The Bouvier entry in the source material is fragmentary and appears corrupted, mixing an entry on presidential impeachment with an incomplete prest definition. Researchers relying on Bouvier for this term should treat it as unreliable for prest specifically and cross-reference Black's or Burrill's.
Because the term belongs to the exchequer system of accounting, it is closely connected to research into the pipe rolls, the Court of Exchequer, and the office of sheriff in English legal history. It will not appear in American legal sources in any operative sense, as the exchequer system was not transplanted to the colonies.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Burrill's are in complete agreement, presenting nearly identical definitions citing Cowell's legal lexicon as the underlying authority. All three treat prest as an old English law term and locate it firmly in the exchequer-accounting context. None of the dictionaries elaborates on the advance-of-money sense, though that usage appears in historical administrative records and is consistent with the broader etymology of the word.
Bouvier's entry is unreliable for this term. The source material shows a garbled entry that conflates prest with presidential removal provisions — an obvious digitization or indexing error. Researchers should not rely on Bouvier for this definition.
No historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus provides significant additional nuance beyond the exchequer-liability meaning. The term's narrowness in legal usage is itself informative: it was a term of practice in fiscal administration rather than a term of general legal doctrine, and it did not generate the kind of jurisprudential elaboration that would have required extended treatment in legal dictionaries.
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Jurisdictional Note
PREST is an English law term with no operative American legal equivalent. It belongs to the exchequer system of royal fiscal administration, which was not adopted in the United States. American researchers will encounter it only in historical English sources.
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