Definition
An ancient coin that circulated in England in two denominations: a gold variety equivalent to a ducat and valued at approximately nine shillings sixpence, and a silver variety valued at approximately two shillings. The coin originated at Constantinople and was among the foreign currencies recognized in English commercial and legal practice during the medieval and early modern periods.
Why It Matters in Research
ZANT is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in historical legal and commercial documents — particularly in debt instruments, merchant accounts, probate inventories, and trade records from periods when foreign coinage circulated alongside domestic English currency. Its relevance is narrow but specific: misidentifying the denomination (gold versus silver) in a source document can produce a tenfold valuation error, since the two varieties differed dramatically in value. Researchers working with medieval or early modern financial records should treat any reference to a zant as requiring denomination identification before any monetary conversion or comparison is attempted.
The term is effectively obsolete in modern legal usage and will not appear in contemporary statutes, codes, or case law. Its appearance in a legal source almost certainly indicates a historical document, a treatise drawing on earlier authorities, or a numismatic or commercial history context. Wharton's law dictionary is the upstream source for this entry as it appears in Black's; researchers seeking additional detail should consult Wharton directly and may find further context in historical numismatic literature and records of the English medieval money market.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary reproduces this entry essentially from Wharton, identifying the coin's Byzantine origin and both of its English valuations. The entry is brief and purely descriptive, with no discussion of any legal doctrine attaching to the coin itself. This reflects the nature of such entries in the historical dictionaries: foreign currency terms were included as reference tools for practitioners and scholars reading older instruments, not because the coins generated independent legal principles.
Historical dictionaries of this era routinely catalogued foreign coinage because English courts and commercial practice frequently encountered documents denominated in ducats, florins, and similar foreign units. The zant fits this pattern. No significant divergence exists among sources on the basic definition; the term is simply too narrow and historically bounded to have generated interpretive controversy.
What the historical sources collectively omit is any sustained treatment of how English courts valued or converted such coins in litigation, or how exchange rates fluctuated over the coin's period of circulation. Researchers needing that level of detail must look beyond legal dictionaries to monetary history scholarship.
Jurisdictional Note
The zant was current in England and its valuation in shillings reflects English monetary standards. Researchers encountering the term in records from other jurisdictions should verify whether local valuations differed, as exchange rates for foreign coinage varied by time and place.