Definition
TAILE (also spelled Taille). An archaic Law French term with two historically attested meanings in legal usage.
1. A tally; a record of indebtedness or account kept by means of a notched stick or scored mark, used in medieval commerce and exchequer practice. The taille in this sense was a physical or documentary device for recording transactions between parties, particularly debts owed to the Crown or between merchants.
2. In the context of jury and counsel practice, to "obtain from a jury" — that is, to secure a verdict or to draw out a finding. Burrill records this sense in connection with the role of counsel in managing or eliciting jury responses, though the usage is narrow and archaic.
The term is closely related to, and sometimes confused with, TAIL (as in fee tail), but the two are etymologically and functionally distinct. TAILE in its tally sense belongs to administrative and commercial law history; TAIL as a form of land tenure belongs to property law.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In French, "taille" means a cut, a size, or a notch. In historical English usage it referred to a tax levied by French kings on their subjects, or to the act of cutting or notching.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's does not give a separate entry for "taile" as a legal term, but "taille" appears as a French fiscal term — a direct tax imposed on commoners in pre-Revolutionary France — distinct from noble or clerical exemptions.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant. The French fiscal meaning (a tax on commoners) does not carry into English legal usage. English legal sources use TAILE narrowly for the tally instrument or the jury-related sense described above, not for taxation. Researchers encountering "taille" in French legal or historical texts should not assume the English common-law meaning applies.
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Common Confusion
TAILE / TAIL / FEE TAIL: These three forms look and sound nearly identical but occupy different doctrinal spaces. TAIL (fee tail, or estate in tail) is a form of real property tenure limiting inheritance to lineal descendants, governed by the Statute De Donis Conditionalibus (1285) and a vast subsequent common law. TAILE in the tally sense has nothing to do with land tenure. The spelling variants — taile, taille, tail — appear inconsistently across medieval and early modern manuscripts, and scribal practice was not uniform. Researchers working with manuscript sources should not assume a reference to "taile" is necessarily a reference to fee tail without examining context carefully.
TAILE / TALLY: The taille-as-tally is functionally equivalent to the exchequer tally, but the word "tally" in later English sources displaced "taile" almost entirely. By the time of Blackstone and the institutional writers, "tally" is the operative term; "taile" in this sense is a pure archaism.
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Why It Matters in Research
For most Law Mind corpus researchers, TAILE will appear as a historical artifact rather than an operative legal concept. The key navigational points are:
1. Spelling instability in primary sources. Medieval and early modern manuscripts use taile, taille, tail, and tally interchangeably or without clear distinction. When searching digitized sources, run all spelling variants. A search for "fee tail" may miss documents using "fee taile."
2. The jury-extraction sense is poorly documented. Burrill's notation — "to obtain from a jury; as a counsel" — is thin and lacks elaboration. Researchers who encounter this usage in period sources should treat it as a procedural term of art whose precise meaning may require context from surrounding text. Do not assume it refers to the tally sense.
3. French legal sources require independent caution. The fiscal taille of French law appears in sources touching on Normandy, the Channel Islands, and Anglo-Norman legal history. This usage does not map onto either English meaning of taile. Researchers using comparative or Norman legal materials must treat French taille as a separate term.
4. Modern "tail coverage" in insurance law is a wholly separate and unrelated usage. The Insurance Law Encyclopedia entry on tail coverage (extended reporting periods) derives its name from "tail" in the temporal sense — the tail end of a policy period — and has no etymological or doctrinal connection to the archaic taile discussed here. Do not conflate.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole substantial historical dictionary entry for this term, and it is notably brief. Burrill records two senses — the tally and the jury-extraction usage — with minimal elaboration and a citation to Dyer (the reports of Sir James Dyer, Chief Justice of Common Pleas, published posthumously in 1585). The tally sense is the more widely corroborated of the two across general medieval historical scholarship, consistent with exchequer practice under which tally sticks served as receipts for Crown revenues well into the early modern period. The jury-extraction sense is unusual and Burrill does not develop it; it may reflect a very narrow procedural idiom of a particular period or court. No other major common-law dictionary in the standard historical shelf — Bouvier, Black's early editions, Tomlin's — appears to give TAILE a substantive independent entry, treating it instead as a variant of TAIL or subsuming it within tally-related entries. This silence in the broader dictionary tradition reinforces that TAILE is a marginal term historically and not a load-bearing concept in any established legal doctrine.
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Jurisdictional Note
TAILE as an operative legal term is effectively extinct in all modern common-law jurisdictions. Its relevance is confined to historical legal research, particularly in English, Welsh, and Anglo-Norman materials predating the seventeenth century. Researchers working with Channel Islands law or early Canadian and American colonial documents derived from Norman or French sources may encounter taille in the French fiscal sense, which requires separate treatment under civilian or customary law frameworks.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
For the modern insurance law usage of "tail" (extended reporting periods), see: The Law Mind Insurance Law Encyclopedia, "Policy Period, Retroactive Dates, and Extended Reporting Periods (Tail Coverage)." Note that this entry addresses a wholly distinct concept; the etymological overlap is superficial.
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