Definition
TALE carries two distinct legal meanings, both now archaic in practice:
1. (Pleading) In old English pleading, the plaintiff's count, declaration, or narrative of the case — the formal statement of the plaintiff's claim as presented to the court. The term is essentially synonymous with "declaration" or "count" in this context and fell out of active use as common-law pleading terminology standardized around those latter terms.
2. (Accounting/Finance) The count or counting of money — a reckoning by number rather than by weight. This sense gave rise to the related term "tally" and the modern word "teller" (as in a bank teller who counts out currency).
Neither sense appears in modern American legal usage. Researchers will encounter TALE almost exclusively in pre-19th century English legal sources and in treatises commenting on those sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A story or narrative; a report or rumor; also, a count or enumeration; and in confidence-scheme contexts, the fraudulent scenario presented to a victim.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 unhelpfully cross-references only "tael" (a unit of weight), reflecting the word's declining general currency by that period.
The gap here runs in both directions. The ordinary sense of "tale" as a story or narrative is close to, but not identical with, the legal pleading sense: a tale in pleading was a formal, structured legal narration with procedural consequences, not a casual account. The counting sense, meanwhile, is largely lost to modern common usage but was the operative sense in financial and administrative contexts — and it is this counting sense that connects tale to tally and teller.
Common Confusion
TALE and TALES are related but distinct terms. TALE (singular) refers to the plaintiff's pleading or to a count of money. TALES (plural, from the Latin talis, meaning "such" or "like") is an entirely separate procedural term referring to additional jurors summoned to complete a deficient jury panel. The two terms appear in proximity in historical sources and share the same headword space in several dictionaries, creating a genuine trap for researchers. See TALES for the jury-completion doctrine.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law materials — Year Books, Plea Rolls, early Blackstone commentaries — will encounter "tale" as the standard term for what later sources call the declaration or count. The shift in terminology is gradual and overlapping: sources from the 16th through early 18th centuries may use tale, count, and declaration interchangeably or with subtle distinctions that reflect the conventions of a particular court or reporter.
The money-counting sense of tale appears most often in administrative records, exchequer documents, and early banking or commercial materials. Researchers examining historical financial instruments or treasury records should recognize tale as a mode of reckoning (by number) as opposed to reckoning by weight — a distinction that mattered practically when coin quality was variable.
The single greatest research trap is the proximity of TALE to TALES in dictionary and index entries. Many historical dictionaries treat them under the same headword or in immediate succession. A researcher looking up one term may inadvertently read the definition of the other. Bouvier's, for example, moves directly from TALE (the pleading term) to TALES (the jury-completion doctrine) within the same entry block, with only a parenthetical Latin note as a divider.
Finally, the etymological connection that historical sources emphasize — tale, tally, teller — is not merely antiquarian. It can help researchers trace conceptual lineage across sources that use different terminology for related counting and accounting practices.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in strong agreement on the pleading definition. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's all cite Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Com. 293) as authority and define tale as the plaintiff's count or declaration. Burrill adds the Latin citation "Monstre son tale" from Dyer, which is useful for researchers tracing the phrase in Year Book materials.
Anderson's simply cross-references DECLARATION, reflecting the practical merger of the two terms by the time of that dictionary's compilation — a useful signal that by the late 19th century, "tale" as a pleading term had become sufficiently archaic that even legal dictionaries were redirecting readers to the live term.
On the money-counting sense, Black's and Burrill both note the etymological connection to tally and to the modern "teller," drawing on Cowell. This is one of the more instructive etymology-to-meaning connections in this corner of the lexicon: the "teller" who counts out bank notes descends directly from this sense of tale.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is how tale functioned procedurally in specific courts — whether the term carried identical meaning in King's Bench versus Common Pleas, for example. Researchers needing that granularity will need to go beyond dictionary sources to court-specific procedural treatises and the primary records themselves.
Jurisdictional Note
TALE in its pleading sense is a feature of English common law and appears in American colonial and early republic sources that tracked English practice. It does not appear as a live term in any modern American jurisdiction. The counting sense similarly has no current jurisdictional application.