Definition
To affere (also affeurer, afforer) is a term from Law French meaning to tax, assess, regulate, or proportion a penalty or amercement. In medieval English legal practice, affering was the process by which an amercement — a monetary penalty imposed by a court — was fixed at a specific sum appropriate to the offense and the offender's circumstances. The act of affering was performed by afferors, officers appointed for the purpose of setting the amount of the penalty after a court had determined that a fine was due.
Common Language
This term has no meaningful counterpart in modern common English. It is pure legal and administrative vocabulary of the medieval Anglo-Norman courts and appears in no ordinary usage context. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is therefore omitted.
Common Confusion
AFFERE / AFFEROR / AMERCEMENT: These three terms operate together and are easily conflated. The amercement is the penalty itself; to affere is the act of fixing the amount; the afferor (pl. afferors) is the person who performs that fixing. Researchers encountering any one of these terms in a historical source should look for the others nearby. See also AMERCEMENT and AFFERORS in related terms below.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records — Year Books, plea rolls, and treatises rooted in the common law of the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. Researchers working in those periods will encounter affere and its variants in contexts involving amercements, where a court record may show that a party was amerced and then afferéd to a specific sum, as in the Yearbook example cited by Burrill: Il fuit amercy et affere a iv d. (He was amerced and afferéd at four pence).
Several navigational points for corpus researchers:
First, spelling is highly unstable. Burrill alone lists affere, affeurer, and afforer as variants. Latin records may render the concept differently still. A search limited to one spelling will miss significant occurrences.
Second, the term does not survive into modern legal usage in any recognizable form. This creates a research gap: modern indexes and digests will not contain it. Researchers must go directly to primary medieval sources or to Law French glossaries and dictionaries to trace its use.
Third, the function the term describes — proportioning a penalty to an offender's means and the gravity of the offense — is jurisprudentially significant. The Magna Carta provisions on amercements (chapters 20–22 in the 1215 version) required that amercements be proportioned to the offense, and the afferors were the institutional mechanism for implementing that requirement. Understanding affere thus connects directly to larger questions about due process, proportionality, and the limits on royal and seignorial penalty-imposition in medieval English law.
Fourth, Burrill treats affere by cross-referencing to affaire and then building out the cluster of related terms (afferatores, affeurer, afforer). The entry is brief and points researchers to Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum and Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language as additional authorities — both shelf sources useful for Law French legal vocabulary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is sparse but structurally sound. It provides the core meaning (to tax, assess, regulate, proportion), identifies the Law French register, cites Spelman and Kelham as primary glossary authorities, and anchors the term with a dated Year Book citation (Yearbook, 10 Edw. III, f. 11). The example sentence — Il fuit amercy et affere a iv d — is genuinely instructive: it shows affere operating in tandem with the amercement, confirming the procedural sequence in which a liability was established first and then afferéd to a sum.
What the Burrill entry does not provide: any account of the institutional machinery (who afferors were, how they were selected, under what authority they acted), no connection to the Magna Carta proportionality requirements, and no discussion of the term's disappearance from later legal vocabulary. Researchers needing that context must look to Spelman's Glossarium or to secondary scholarship on medieval English court procedure.
No other source dictionary in the Law Mind corpus covers this term, so no comparison across historical dictionaries is possible at this time.
Jurisdictional Note
Affere is specific to the English common law tradition as received through the Anglo-Norman court system. It does not appear as a functional legal term in Scots law, canon law, or civil law systems, though those systems had analogous mechanisms for fixing penalties. Researchers working in other legal traditions should look for parallel concepts rather than the term itself.