Definition
An ancient prerogative right of the English Crown to exact a portion of imported wine as a form of in-kind revenue. In its primary sense, prisage entitled the Crown to take two tuns of wine from every ship importing twenty or more tuns into England — one tun from before the mast and one from behind. The right applied to both English and foreign vessels.
A secondary, related meaning extends prisage to the Crown's or admiral's share of merchandise taken as lawful prize at sea, distinguishing the sovereign's portion from that of the captors.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A right of the English Crown to take two tuns of wine from ships importing twenty or more tuns; also, the sovereign's share of prize goods taken at sea.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Identical in substance — a royal right to take two tuns of wine from qualifying ships, converted to butlerage by Edward I; also the Crown's or admiral's share of maritime prize.
The common and legal meanings here are unusually close, because prisage is a term of art that passed into general English vocabulary largely through its legal context. The only gap worth noting is that common usage tends to flatten prisage into a single concept, while the legal sources distinguish two meanings: the wine-import levy and the prize-goods share. Researchers should not treat these as interchangeable.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Wine Prisage (primary): The in-kind levy on imported wine, taking two tuns from ships carrying twenty or more. This is the historically dominant meaning and the one most consistently treated in the legal dictionaries.
Butlerage: Not a subtype of prisage but its replacement. By charter of Edward I, the in-kind wine levy was commuted into a money payment of two shillings per tun imported by foreign merchants, collected by the king's butler. Rapalje & Lawrence and Burrill's both record this conversion. Subsequent regulation of wine duties passed to the Customs Acts.
Prize Prisage: The Crown's or admiral's entitlement to a share of goods lawfully captured at sea. Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary both record this meaning. It sits closer to admiralty and prize law than to customs or revenue law, and should be researched through those bodies of doctrine rather than through wine-import materials.
Why It Matters in Research
Prisage is an obsolete English revenue right with no continuing modern legal force, but it appears frequently in historical sources on prerogative revenue, customs law, and admiralty. Researchers working in any of these areas should be aware of several traps.
First, the term has two distinct meanings that can appear in the same period sources without signal: the wine-import levy and the prize-goods share. Burrill's is the most explicit in separating them; Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's focus narrowly on the wine levy. A researcher treating all prisage references as wine-import matters will misread admiralty materials, and vice versa.
Second, the wine prisage was abolished in practical effect during the reign of Edward I, replaced by butlerage. Sources predating that conversion use prisage to describe an active right; sources postdating it use prisage historically while butlerage describes the operative charge. The conversion date matters for establishing which regime applies to a given document.
Third, Bouvier's frames prisage specifically as a duty on "aliens or denizens," framing that differs subtly from the other dictionaries, which describe it as applying to ships generally. Researchers citing Bouvier's on this point should cross-check against Burrill's, which is more precise: the in-kind taking applied to all ships (English or foreign) importing twenty or more tuns, while the money commutation (butlerage) applied specifically to merchant strangers.
Fourth, the term connects to the broader law of prerogative revenue, royal purveyance, and customs. Researchers using prisage as an entry point into prerogative fiscal rights will need to follow threads into purveyance, primage, and the history of the Crown's customs powers — none of which are identical to prisage, but all of which appear in the same historical corpus.
Historical Dictionary Support
The source dictionaries agree on the core facts: prisage was an ancient hereditary Crown revenue, the wine levy applied to ships importing twenty or more tuns, and it was converted to a money payment (butlerage) under Edward I. Black's (2nd Ed.) and Rapalje & Lawrence both cite 2 Steph. Comm. for this proposition; Burrill's provides the fullest operational detail, specifying the two-shilling rate and the role of the king's butler.
Bouvier's is the outlier in characterizing prisage as "one-tenth of the amount of wine," a framing inconsistent with the two-tun formula given by every other source and by both general dictionaries. The one-tenth framing may reflect a different period, a variant of the right, or simply an error; it should not be used without verification.
None of the historical dictionaries gives sustained treatment to prize prisage. That meaning surfaces only in Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary, suggesting it was considered either too obvious or too marginal for dedicated legal-dictionary treatment. Researchers needing doctrinal depth on the prize meaning should look to admiralty treatises rather than these dictionary entries.
Burrill's notation of the French root (prise, a taking) is editorially useful for cross-referencing in law French sources, where the term appears in variant spellings.
Jurisdictional Note
Prisage was a right of the English Crown with no transplanted American counterpart. It does not appear as an operative doctrine in any U.S. jurisdiction. American researchers encounter it only in historical or comparative contexts — most commonly in colonial-era customs materials or scholarship on prerogative revenue. Prize law in the American tradition developed independently through admiralty courts and statute.