Definition
An archaic Anglo-French and Middle English legal term for a house or shop where wine was sold and consumed on the premises. In old English law, *taverne* denoted what modern law would recognize as a licensed retail drinking establishment — specifically one dealing in wine, distinguishable from an alehouse (which sold ale) or an inn (which provided lodging). The term appears in early legal records, coroner's inquest procedures, and statutes governing the keeping of public drinking houses.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of "tavern."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; subsumed under "tavern" — a public house where travelers and others are furnished with food and drink.
The gap between common and legal usage is primarily historical rather than conceptual. In ordinary modern English, *taverne* is simply an archaic spelling. In legal texts, however, the term carries a more precise meaning: it referred specifically to a wine-selling establishment, not a general public house. Researchers who encounter *taverne* in old legal documents and substitute the modern concept of "tavern" may miss the narrower commercial and regulatory context the word carried in early English law.
Common Confusion
*Taverne* is easily conflated with *inn* and *alehouse* in historical legal sources, but the three were distinct categories carrying different licensing obligations, liability rules, and regulatory treatment. An inn (*hospitium*) was obligated to receive travelers and provide lodging; an alehouse sold ale for consumption; a taverne sold wine. The distinctions mattered in early regulatory law because keepers of each type of establishment were subject to different controls and were treated differently in coroner's proceedings, licensing statutes, and liability for wrongs committed on the premises.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal records — Year Books, plea rolls, coroner's inquests, early statutes — will encounter *taverne* in contexts where precise commercial meaning matters. The Burrill excerpt illustrates the term's use in a coroner's inquest formula asking whether a felony was committed inside a house, outside, *in taverne*, at a wrestling match, or at some other assembly. This reflects early English law's concern with the circumstances and location of violent death, and *taverne* in that context is a specific locational and social category, not a generic synonym for any drinking establishment.
Researchers should be alert to several traps:
First, spelling variation is significant. Older records may render the word as *taverne*, *tavern*, *taberna*, or *taverna* depending on whether the scribe was writing in Anglo-French, Law Latin, or Middle English. Burrill links *taverne* to the Latin *taberna*, and researchers may need to search multiple forms when using indexed sources.
Second, the wine-selling specificity of *taverne* can affect how licensing and regulatory statutes apply. Early English statutes controlling the wine trade operated on different terms than those controlling alehouses, and conflating the establishments can produce misreadings of regulatory scope.
Third, the term appears in coroner's inquest records as part of formulaic recitations about the location of a killing — a context where its meaning is geographic and social rather than strictly legal. Researchers using these records to reconstruct commercial regulation should distinguish between *taverne* as a legal category and its use as a location marker in criminal procedure texts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source available for this term. His entry correctly identifies *taverne* as an Anglo-French form derived from the Latin *taberna* and accurately describes it as a wine shop or wine house in old English law. The excerpt from the coroner's inquest formula he provides is a useful illustration of the term functioning in a procedural legal text.
Burrill's entry is competent but brief. It does not address the regulatory distinction between tavernes, alehouses, and inns in depth, nor does it trace the term's evolution across the medieval and early modern periods. Researchers looking for fuller treatment of the licensing and regulatory framework governing wine sellers in early English law will need to look beyond the historical dictionaries to primary sources and specialized legal histories of the licensing trade.
No other entries in the available Law Mind historical dictionary corpus treat *taverne* as a distinct term.
Jurisdictional Note
*Taverne* as a distinct legal term is specific to old English law and the Anglo-French legal tradition. It has no independent significance in American law, where the modern statutory category of "tavern" or "licensed premises" governs, and the wine/ale distinction that gave *taverne* its narrow meaning has no operative legal role.