Definition
A Latin term from Roman and medieval legal usage carrying two related but distinct meanings:
1. To rate or value. In the civil law tradition, taxare referred to the act of estimating or fixing the value of a thing — including damages, costs, or assessments — with authority. It implied a formal, official valuation rather than a private estimate.
2. To tax or lay a tribute. In its broader civil law sense, taxare meant to impose a charge, levy, or tribute on persons or property by public authority.
3. To assess, moderate, or regulate a rate. In old English practice, taxare carried a more specific procedural meaning: the act of formally assessing costs or damages, or of moderating a jury's award downward when it exceeded a reasonable measure. This is the sense closest to the English legal term "taxation of costs" — the judicial review and adjustment of claimed expenses in litigation.
The term is the Latin root from which "tax" and "taxation" in English legal usage derive, but its significance in historical legal sources is primarily procedural rather than fiscal.
Common Confusion
Researchers may conflate taxare in its fiscal sense (laying a public levy) with its procedural sense (moderating an assessment or taxing costs in litigation). These are functionally different operations. In historical English practice, the dominant legal use of taxare was procedural — the power of a court officer or justice to review and reduce a jury's damages or a party's claimed costs — not the imposition of a public tax. Encountering taxare in a medieval English legal record almost certainly signals the procedural sense, not a fiscal one.
Why It Matters in Research
Taxare is a source term: understanding it is essential for tracing the ancestry of several English legal concepts that survive in modern practice, particularly the "taxation of costs" (the court-supervised review of litigation expenses) and the role of the taxing master or taxing officer.
The procedural sense preserved in Burrill's extended entry is especially valuable. The quoted passage — concerning justiciaries who may reduce jury awards downward if jurors have exceeded a reasonable measure, but may not increase the award beyond what the jury assessed — illuminates the medieval English doctrine that taxare was a moderating, not amplifying, power. Courts could tax costs or damages down; they could not tax them up. This asymmetry matters for understanding the limits of judicial discretion in early English procedure.
Researchers working with Year Books, plea rolls, or early chancery records should be alert to taxare and its variants (taxandum, taxanda, taxari) appearing in procedural contexts: cost awards, assessment of damages after verdict, and the moderation of amercements. The term will not always be translated explicitly in secondary literature, and it is sometimes conflated loosely with the fiscal taxation vocabulary.
For researchers in legal history tracing the development of cost-shifting rules or the office of taxing master in English courts, taxare is a gateway term that connects Roman-law valuation doctrine to English procedural practice through the medieval period.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the 1st and 2nd editions) gives identical entries, covering both the civil law valuation sense (citing Calvin) and the English practice sense (assessing, rating, moderating). The entries are accurate but sparse, and neither edition develops the procedural significance of the moderating function.
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the most instructive of the three sources. Its entry reproduces a Latin passage that encodes a key principle: damages are to be estimated by the oath of jurors and, if justices find it necessary, reduced (taxanda) to a lesser sum — but damages may not be assessed higher than the jury's figure. This passage, though Burrill does not identify its source with full precision, reflects the kind of procedural constraint found in Bracton and related medieval treatises. Burrill's entry thus adds substantive legal content that Black's omits.
None of the three historical dictionaries address the etymological bridge between taxare and modern taxation vocabulary, nor do they connect the term to the later English office of the taxing master — a gap that researchers should be aware of when using these sources as starting points.
Jurisdictional Note
Taxare as a live term of art belongs to legal history and comparative law rather than to any modern jurisdiction's operative vocabulary. Its procedural descendant — the taxation of costs — remains a recognized process in English civil procedure and in Commonwealth jurisdictions. American federal and state courts use analogous processes under different terminology (bill of costs, cost assessment), but the Latin term itself does not appear in modern American practice.