Definition
Tailage is an archaic term for a compulsory levy, tribute, or tax — specifically, a share of one's property or substance cut from the whole and paid to a superior authority. Functionally equivalent to tallage, tailage refers to the class of feudal impositions by which a lord, king, or municipality exacted payment from tenants or subjects as a condition of tenure or governance. The term appears in historical legal sources as a variant spelling of tallage and carries the same meaning. See TALLAGE.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of tallage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): See Tallage.
The term has no surviving common English usage. It appears only in historical and legal contexts, and its meaning in those contexts is identical to its legal meaning. Researchers encountering tailage in primary sources should treat it as a straightforward variant spelling and consult the entry for TALLAGE.
Common Confusion
Tailage, tallage, and talliage appear as variant spellings of the same concept across historical sources and should not be treated as distinct legal terms. The differences are orthographic, not substantive. Additionally, tailage should not be confused with taillage or terms derived from tail (as in fee tail or estate in tail), which belong to an entirely different doctrinal family concerning hereditary limitations on land conveyance.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern legal materials will encounter tailage, tallage, talliage, and taillage as interchangeable spellings. Corpus searching should account for all variants. Because Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) defines tailage identically and Bouvier redirects to tallage without independent discussion, the historical dictionaries do not treat this as a term of independent significance — it is a variant entry, not a standalone doctrine.
The substantive research interest lies in tallage itself: the nature of feudal taxation, the gradual restriction of arbitrary tallage under English constitutional development, and the distinction between tallage as a feudal incident versus regulated parliamentary taxation. Tailage as a spelling variant is most likely to appear in older English statutes, Year Books, and treatises where spelling had not yet standardized. Researchers should not assume that a source using tailage is referring to something doctrinally distinct from tallage.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources converge on treating tailage as a variant of tallage with no independent doctrinal content. Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) defines the term as a piece cut from the whole — a share of substance paid as tribute or tax — citing Cowell's Interpreter, a standard early modern legal glossary. Bouvier offers no independent definition and redirects entirely to tallage. This unanimity confirms that no meaningful divergence existed among authorities on this point: tailage was never a term of art distinct from tallage, and the historical dictionaries reflect that consensus by treating it as a spelling variant rather than an independent entry.
The Cowell citation in Black's is notable. John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607) was an influential early legal dictionary, and its definitions of feudal terms — including tallage and its variants — were drawn heavily from Norman French and Latin sources where spelling variation was endemic. Researchers relying on pre-nineteenth-century sources should expect similar inconsistency and should not treat orthographic differences as evidence of doctrinal distinction.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Tallage; Feudal Incidents; History of Taxation in English Law.