“The border tax on goods is called customs — from Latin consuetudo, a habit or custom — because the duty levied on imported goods was originally a customary payment made by merchants who used the port, as regular as a habit.”
Latin consuetudo (custom, habit, established practice) came from consuescere (to accustom oneself, to become used to), from con- + suescere (to become accustomed). Old French costume (habit, custom) gave English 'custom' in both its senses: a habitual practice, and the duty paid at a port. The bridge is in the idea of regularity: customs duties were the habitual payment made by merchants who passed through a port. Not a fine, not a fee, but a custom — something you paid as a matter of course.
English customs duties were already collected at ports by the 11th century. The Magna Carta (1215) referred to 'ancient and lawful customs' of merchants, implying a tradition of customary payment. The English Customs Service — one of the oldest government institutions in England — traces its formal origins to 1275 when Edward I established the first systematic national customs schedule. Geoffrey Chaucer served as Comptroller of Customs for the port of London from 1374 to 1386.
The customs house — the building at the port where duties were assessed and collected — became an architectural fixture of every significant trading port. In the 18th century, merchants gathering in London's coffeehouses to discuss trade clustered around the customs houses and insurance offices in the City. Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, near the Custom House in Tower Street, became the origin of Lloyd's of London insurance market.
Modern customs — the agency and the tax — have bifurcated from social customs entirely. Customs as border control and import duty has its own bureaucracy and vocabulary: customs declaration, customs clearance, customs broker. Social custom retains the habit sense: it is customary to tip waiters, to remove shoes at temple entrances. Both still descend from Roman consuetudo — the things you do as a matter of course.
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The customs officer at the border and the social custom at the dinner table share a word because both are habits — things done regularly, expected, built into the fabric of the community or the state. The customs duty was originally the merchant's regular payment, as expected and as regular as any social custom.
Chaucer sat in the Custom House and counted wool bales. He also wrote The Canterbury Tales. The most English of writers worked the most commercially English of government jobs. Between the counting and the poetry, he learned what habitual passage looked like from both inside and outside the border.
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