Definition
Romescot (also Romepenny, Rome-fee, or Peter's Pence) is an obsolete term from old English law referring to an annual tribute of one penny paid from every household in England to the Pope in Rome, traditionally collected at the feast of St. Peter. It was a fiscal obligation with both ecclesiastical and quasi-governmental character — functioning as a form of religious taxation enforced through civil custom. The payment acknowledged papal authority over the English church and served as a material expression of England's relationship to Rome during the medieval period.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An alms-fee.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; the concept would have been understood through the broader term "Peter's Pence."
The Wiktionary gloss — "an alms-fee" — undersells the legal dimension. Romescot was not a voluntary charitable donation in the manner of ordinary almsgiving. It was a compulsory tribute with the character of a tax, collected systematically from householders and remitted to Rome. Describing it as an alms-fee captures its destination but obscures its mandatory nature and its role in the constitutional relationship between the English crown, the church, and the papacy.
Common Confusion
Romescot is sometimes loosely equated with the broader term Peter's Pence, and the two are indeed closely related — but Peter's Pence became a global voluntary Catholic charitable collection following the English Reformation, while Romescot refers specifically to the pre-Reformation compulsory English tribute. A researcher encountering Peter's Pence in modern ecclesiastical sources is looking at a fundamentally different institution than the medieval Romescot. Rome-fee (Rome-feah) and Romepenny are direct synonyms for Romescot and may appear interchangeably in historical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
Romescot is a term of pure historical significance — it has no operative legal force in any modern jurisdiction. Researchers will encounter it primarily in three contexts: medieval English ecclesiastical law, histories of the English Reformation (where abolition of Romescot became a flashpoint in the break with Rome), and fiscal or constitutional histories tracing the limits of papal authority in England.
The principal research trap is terminological inconsistency across historical sources. Burrill lists Romescot, Romepenny, Rome-fee, and Rome-feah as equivalents, and period documents may use any of these forms. Corpus searches should account for all variants. Additionally, post-Reformation sources that revive the term Peter's Pence in a voluntary charitable sense can create anachronistic confusion if read back onto medieval materials.
The Spelman and Cowell citations in Burrill's entry are useful pointers for researchers going deeper into primary glossarists — Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum and John Cowell's The Interpreter are standard reference points for this class of obsolete English legal terms and should be consulted for fuller historical treatment.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's is the sole source dictionary here, and its entry is compact but precise. It correctly identifies the three main synonym forms (Romepenny, Rome-fee, Rome-feah), fixes the obligation at one penny per household annually, and ties collection to the feast of St. Peter. The citations to Spelman and Cowell confirm the term's grounding in the standard glossarists of old English law.
What Burrill's does not address is the legal mechanism of enforcement, the history of disputes between English kings and Rome over collection, or the eventual statutory abolition of the tribute. For a term of this age and constitutional weight, those silences are significant. Researchers should look beyond dictionary sources to ecclesiastical histories and studies of medieval Anglo-papal relations for the fuller picture.
The appended note in Burrill's entry — that "ROOM" was held not to import a place of public resort, citing 4 Ohio St. R. 467 — is an artifact of the dictionary's alphabetical arrangement and has no substantive connection to Romescot.
Jurisdictional Note
Romescot was specific to England and was formally abolished as part of the Henrician Reformation in the sixteenth century. It has no counterpart in American law and no ongoing legal force anywhere. Its relevance today is entirely historical and comparative.