Definition
Simple average is a term from maritime and admiralty law, used historically to denote particular average — that is, a partial loss or damage to a ship or its cargo that falls solely on the owner of the affected property, rather than being shared proportionally among all parties to a maritime venture. It stands in contrast to general average, in which losses are distributed across all cargo owners and the shipowner because the loss was incurred for the common benefit of the voyage.
In practical terms, if a portion of a cargo is damaged by seawater during a storm, and that damage was not the result of a deliberate sacrifice made to save the ship and remaining cargo, the loss is a simple (or particular) average — borne alone by the owner of the damaged goods. No contribution is owed by others.
Common Confusion
Simple average and general average are the two poles of maritime loss allocation, and the distinction is essential. General average requires a voluntary sacrifice for the common safety, shared proportionally by all interests; simple average (particular average) requires no sharing — the loss lies where it falls. The word "average" in both terms derives from the older mercantile sense of a proportional contribution or duty, not from the arithmetic sense of a mean, which can mislead researchers encountering these terms for the first time.
The term "simple average" should not be confused with its arithmetic homonym. In a legal or maritime research context, "simple average" never refers to a calculated mean of numbers.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter "simple average" primarily in older admiralty materials, marine insurance treatises, and commercial law sources predating the twentieth century. The term is essentially a French-law synonym for particular average, and its appearance in English-language sources often signals that the author is drawing on continental sources — particularly the French Ordonnance de la Marine (1681) — or working within an older civilian-influenced framework.
Modern maritime law practice and scholarship has largely abandoned "simple average" in favor of "particular average," and many twentieth-century sources use only the latter. Researchers searching for doctrine in modern admiralty materials should use particular average as the primary search term and treat simple average as a historical variant.
The distinction between particular/simple average and general average remains live and practically significant in marine insurance disputes. Policy language frequently specifies coverage "free of particular average" (F.P.A.) or "with particular average" (W.P.A.), terms that continue to appear in older policy forms and in litigation interpreting historical contracts.
Because all four historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus treat simple average as a bare cross-reference to particular average, any substantive doctrine must be traced through that entry — especially through Bouvier's extended treatment under AVERAGE.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are unanimous: simple average is defined entirely by reference to particular average, with no independent elaboration. Black's, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier all direct the reader to particular average without further comment. Burrill adds the lone substantive note, identifying the term as belonging to French law and citing the Ordonnance de la Marine (liv. 3, tit. 7, art. 2, 3) — confirming that simple average entered English legal vocabulary as a translation or adaptation of the French civilian tradition rather than as an indigenous common law concept.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply: any treatment of how courts applied the term, how marine insurance policies used it, or how it interacted with English and American admiralty practice. Researchers requiring that depth must look beyond the dictionary shelf to treatises such as Arnould on Marine Insurance or Phillips on Insurance, and to admiralty court records.
Jurisdictional Note
The term appears in both English and American maritime sources but is more prevalent in older English and French-influenced materials. American admiralty practice generally follows English precedent on average questions, but researchers should be aware that policy language and trade custom can vary by insurer, route, and era. The York-Antwerp Rules govern general average internationally by contract in modern shipping; they do not address particular average allocation directly.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No entry in the Law Mind Encyclopedia addresses maritime average directly. The encyclopedia entries matched under "simple" (assault, drug possession, fee simple) are unrelated to this term and should not be consulted for this topic.