Definition
A customary seasonal gift of corn given by farmers to the local blacksmith in exchange for sharpening agricultural implements — specifically plow-irons, harrow-tines, and similar field tools — traditionally rendered at Christmas. Sharping corn was not a negotiated fee or formal contractual payment but a customary obligation rooted in the agrarian service relationships of rural England. Its legal relevance lies in the category of customary dues: recurring, locally recognized obligations that existed outside written contract and were enforceable, in principle, by proof of long-standing custom.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Neither "sharping" nor "sharping corn" appears as a current entry. The word "sharp" carries meanings of keenness, acuity, or sharpening an edge; "corn" in modern American English refers primarily to maize.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Sharp" included the sense of making keen or pointed. "Corn" in British usage referred to grain generally — wheat, rye, oats — not specifically maize.
The legal term combines both senses in a way entirely invisible to a modern reader. "Sharping" here is a gerund describing the service rendered (the sharpening of iron implements), and "corn" is the medium of payment in the older British sense. A researcher encountering this term without context might not recognize it as a legal category at all.
Why It Matters in Research
Sharping corn belongs to a family of terms describing customary dues in English agrarian law — obligations defined not by written agreement but by immemorial local practice. Researchers working in English legal history, manorial records, or the law of custom will encounter these terms scattered across older treatises and dictionaries, often without cross-referencing to the broader doctrinal framework they inhabit.
The term has no living legal application. It does not appear in modern statutory or common law, and no American jurisdiction adopted it. Its research value is entirely historical: it surfaces in the context of customary tenure, copyhold, and the obligations running between tenant farmers and tradespeople in pre-industrial English villages.
The single sourcing note matters: all three historical dictionaries trace the definition to Blount — Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law-Dictionary (1670), one of the earliest English law dictionaries. This means the legal dictionary tradition here is not independently verifying a live legal concept but transmitting an antiquarian observation from a single seventeenth-century source. Researchers should treat this term as a historical artifact rather than a doctrine with independent judicial development.
There is no reported caselaw developing or disputing sharping corn as a term of art. Its presence in Black's and Bouvier's reflects the encyclopedic ambition of nineteenth-century legal lexicography to capture the full range of English legal vocabulary, including terms long obsolete in practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Bouvier's are in complete agreement — all three reproduce substantially identical language, all three cite Blount as the sole authority. There is no divergence, development, or elaboration across the sources. This uniformity is itself informative: the compilers were copying a historical reference rather than synthesizing doctrine from practice.
Bouvier's substitutes "plough" for Black's "plow," reflecting the British spelling retained in that source, but the substance is identical.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the legal mechanism by which such customary gifts could be enforced or disputed — whether through manorial courts, proof of custom in common law courts, or simply through social obligation. That doctrinal context requires research beyond the dictionary sources, in treatises on English customary tenure and manorial law.
Jurisdictional Note
Sharping corn is an English customary concept with no reception in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Research relevance is confined to English legal history and manorial practice.