Definition
A feudal obligation of manorial origin taking one of two related forms: (1) a payment rendered in a fixed measure of grain by a tenant to the lord, functioning as an acknowledgment of tenure or customary service; or (2) a fine or penalty levied against a tenant who failed to perform the customary service of cutting or harvesting the lord's corn. The term thus captures both the affirmative duty and the consequence of its breach within the manorial system.
Why It Matters in Research
Schep is a term of deep antiquity unlikely to appear outside of medieval English manorial records, customals, and early modern treatments of copyhold tenure. Researchers encountering it in historical sources should be alert to which of its two senses is operative — payment in kind as ongoing acknowledgment of the tenurial relationship, or penalty for default — since the legal consequences differ. The term is closely bound to the broader cluster of customary manorial services that were progressively extinguished or commuted to money payments from the late medieval period onward, and effectively disappeared from living legal usage with the abolition of copyhold tenure in England under the Law of Property Act 1922. In the Law Mind corpus, schep will appear almost exclusively in historical materials treating manorial law, copyhold, and agricultural services; it will not appear in American legal sources, which inherited no functional equivalent. Researchers working with manorial rolls or early English conveyancing materials should treat schep as a local customary term whose precise measure and conditions may vary manor by manor — no uniform national standard governed the quantity of grain or the specific default triggering the penalty.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive historical dictionary treatment of this term, defining it as both an acknowledgment paid in corn measure and a fine for failure to perform harvest services. Bouvier does not disaggregate the two senses or indicate which was the earlier or more common usage. The dual nature of the definition is consistent with the broader pattern of manorial terminology, where the same word often described both the customary obligation and the sanction for its neglect. Historical dictionaries of English law more generally — including Jacob's Law Dictionary and Termes de la Ley — do not appear to carry independent entries for schep, suggesting it was a term of sufficiently specialized or local currency that it did not migrate into the standard common law vocabulary. What the historical sources collectively leave unresolved is whether schep designated a fixed national measure or varied by manorial custom, a gap that primary manorial records would need to fill.
Jurisdictional Note
Schep is exclusively an English manorial law term with no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It is relevant only in the context of historical English land tenure research.