Definition
A toll or charge levied for the carriage of goods or persons on horseback. Sumage was a feudal-era impost collected in exchange for the privilege of transporting goods by packhorse across a lord's land or through a jurisdiction. It belonged to the broader family of transit tolls — charges exacted not for the goods themselves but for the act of passage or transport.
Why It Matters in Research
Sumage is an archaic toll term with no surviving operational significance in modern law. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical legal sources dealing with feudal tenure, manorial obligations, and the medieval system of tolls and customs. It appears in discussions of market rights, highway law, and the various exactions that lords and municipalities could levy on travelers and merchants.
When researching historical toll systems, researchers should be aware that the medieval and early modern periods produced a dense vocabulary of overlapping transit charges — sumage, pontage, pavage, passage, lastage, stallage, and others — each technically distinct but frequently conflated in primary sources. Distinguishing between them requires close attention to the specific transaction: what was being moved, by what means, over what kind of infrastructure, and under whose authority. Sumage's defining characteristic, carriage on horseback, sets it apart from tolls tied to wheeled vehicles or waterborne transport, but period documents do not always maintain these distinctions rigorously.
Cowell's Interpreter is the authority most cited by both editions of Black's for this term, which signals that its primary documentary life is in legal antiquarian reference rather than in case law or statute. Researchers working in English manorial records, borough customs, or the history of road and market regulation will find the term meaningful; those working in any modern legal context will not.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary define sumage identically and briefly: a toll for carriage on horseback, attributed to Cowell. The entry is a pure antiquarian gloss — no case law, no statutory context, no doctrinal development. The second edition places the term amid a cluster of Latin maxims beginning with "Summa," which appears to be an artifact of alphabetical arrangement rather than substantive connection. Those maxims concern the supremacy of justice and religious law and have no relationship to sumage as a toll concept.
Neither edition of Black's attempts to situate sumage within the broader taxonomy of feudal tolls, nor do they trace its appearance in English statutes or yearbooks. Cowell's Interpreter (1607) remains the most accessible historical source for the term in its legal sense, and researchers needing depth beyond Black's brief entry should consult that work directly, along with secondary treatments of medieval English market and highway law.