gage

To bind (someone) by pledge or security; to engage.

Great debts / Wherein my time, sometimes too prodigal, / Hath left me gaged.

To bet or wager (something).

O doe not goe, this feaſt (I'le gage my life) / Is but a plot to trayne you to your ruine, / Be rul'd, you ſha'not goe.

To deposit or give (something) as a pledge or security; to pawn.

A moiety competent / Was gaged by our king.

Something, such as a glove or other pledge, thrown down as a challenge to combat (now usually figurative).

“But it is enough that I challenge the trial by combat — there lies my gage.” She took her embroidered glove from her hand, and flung it down before the Grand Master with an air of mingled simplicity and dignity…

"I'm nothing of the sort," exclaimed the MacQuibble, hurling down the gage of battle at once.

Something valuable deposited as a guarantee or pledge; security, ransom.

[I]t seemed to create a sort of material link between the Princess and himself, and at the end of three months it almost appeared to him, not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his own hand, but that it had been placed in that hand by the most remarkable woman in Europe.... [T]he superior piece of work he had done after seeing her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned into a kind of proof and gage, as if a ghost, in vanishing from sight, had left a palpable relic.

Alternative spelling of gauge.