Definition
Procurations is the plural of procuration and carries two historically distinct meanings that rarely overlap in practice.
1. Ecclesiastical dues. In ecclesiastical law, procurations are fees paid by parish priests to their bishops or archdeacons as compensation for visitations — formal inspections of parishes conducted by superior church officers. These payments, made ratione visitationis (by reason of the visitation), were a recognized financial obligation in the pre-Reformation church and continued in modified form in Anglican ecclesiastical administration. The fee reflected the cost of receiving and maintaining the visiting dignitary and his retinue during the inspection.
2. Acts of agency. In civil law usage, procurations refers to the acts carried out by a procurator — a person authorized to act on behalf of another, analogous to an agent or attorney-in-fact. A procuration in this sense is both the authority granted and the acts performed under it. Historically, the term also encompassed the proxy relationship of a lord's representative.
These two meanings share a root in the Latin concept of managing or acting on another's behalf but developed into largely separate legal domains: one ecclesiastical and financial, one civil and transactional.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of procuration — no independent definition offered.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster treated procuration as the act of procuring or obtaining; also the management of another's affairs by an agent; and the written authority by which an agent acts.
The gap matters: Common usage drifted almost entirely toward ordinary "obtaining" or "acquiring" (as in procuring something). Legal usage in ecclesiastical contexts preserved a specific dues-and-visitation meaning that has no counterpart in everyday English. A researcher encountering procurations in a historical ecclesiastical document should not assume the term means fees paid for services procured in any commercial sense — the obligation ran to the church hierarchy, not to a marketplace transaction.
---
Common Confusion
Procurations (ecclesiastical dues) should not be confused with procuration fees in agency or negotiable instruments law, where a procuration fee or per procuration signature signals that a person signs on behalf of a principal under formal authority. These uses share etymological roots but serve entirely different legal functions. Similarly, procuring cause — a key concept in real estate brokerage commission disputes — is a modern doctrinal term that sounds related but is analytically distinct: it concerns which broker's efforts were the efficient cause of a sale, not a historical dues obligation or a formal agency appointment.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus are most likely to encounter procurations in one of three contexts, each requiring different interpretive care.
First, in ecclesiastical and canon law sources: Historical materials on church administration, benefices, and episcopal visitations will use procurations in the dues sense. The obligation was a contentious one — parishes sometimes disputed the amounts or frequency — and reform of procuration obligations was a recurring subject in church councils and synods. Researchers should expect the term to appear in Latin (procurationes) in older sources, with the English form appearing in digests and abridgments like Viner's Abridgment.
Second, in civil law and agency materials: Older civil law treatises and digests treat procurations as synonymous with agency acts or the written authority of a procurator. The Digest of Justinian (Book 3) is the primary classical source. Researchers working on agency history, power of attorney evolution, or comparative civil law will find this usage throughout pre-19th-century materials.
Third, cross-reference trap: Modern researchers pulled into real estate commission litigation may encounter the encyclopedia entry on procuring cause. That doctrine — centered on which broker proximately caused a transaction — shares a Latin ancestor with procurations but is not the same thing. Do not carry ecclesiastical or civil law meanings of procurations into procuring cause analysis; the doctrines developed independently.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st), Black's (2nd), and Bouvier's — agree on the ecclesiastical definition as the primary meaning: fees paid by parish priests to bishops or archdeacons ratione visitationis. The citation trail points consistently to the Digest (with some variation in the book number across editions, reflecting transcription differences in older print runs) and to Ayliffe's Parergon Juris Canonici Anglicani, a recognized authority on English ecclesiastical law. Viner's Abridgment, cited by Bouvier, confirms the term had sufficient doctrinal weight to warrant its own abridgment heading.
Black's 1st edition adds a civil law dimension — procurations as acts of agency, referencing Digest 3.3.1 and characterizing the procurator as agent or attorney — that the 2nd edition omits, narrowing the entry to ecclesiastical law only. This compression in subsequent editions is worth noting: it reflects the declining practical relevance of the agency usage as the term procurator gave way to cleaner modern vocabulary (agent, attorney-in-fact, proxy). Bouvier does not address the civil law agency meaning at all.
No source addresses procurations in the context of modern commercial or real estate law — that connection is terminological, not doctrinal.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The ecclesiastical dues meaning was operative primarily in English and Continental church law and is of historical rather than active legal significance in U.S. jurisdictions. Civil law systems descended from Roman law retain the procurator concept in various forms, but the term procurations in the agency sense has largely been displaced by jurisdiction-specific vocabulary. Researchers working in Louisiana or Quebec civil law sources may encounter related terminology more frequently than in common law jurisdictions.
---
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Broker Commission Disputes — Procuring Cause, Ready Willing and Able Buyer, and MLS Cooperation (Law Mind Real Estate Transactions & Construction Encyclopedia): Relevant for the terminological relationship between procurations and procuring cause; consult for the modern real estate doctrine, not as an extension of the historical legal meaning addressed here.
---