Definition
To set a price or value on a thing; to appraise or assess the worth of goods or property. The term appears in historical legal contexts related to the official fixing of prices, particularly in regulatory or quasi-administrative proceedings where a recognized authority established the price at which goods could be sold.
Why It Matters in Research
AFFORARE is a term a researcher is more likely to encounter in a footnote or glossary than in the operative text of a legal instrument, but its appearance in historical sources — particularly those dealing with medieval and early modern price regulation, market law, or assize proceedings — signals a specific legal function. The assize of bread, ale, and other regulated commodities depended on exactly this kind of official valuation, and afforare (or its variants) sometimes surfaces in Latin or Law French records documenting those proceedings.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus with documents predating the 18th century should note that price-setting authority was a recognized exercise of sovereign and local governmental power. When this term appears, it typically indicates an official act, not a private transaction. Do not read it as a synonym for ordinary commercial pricing or private appraisal. The legal weight is in the officialness of the valuation.
Black's sourcing of the definition to Blount — meaning Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary (1670) — is a useful provenance marker. Blount compiled terms from English legal practice with heavy reliance on Latin and Law French sources, and his entries often reflect usage that had already begun to fade from active legal practice by the mid-17th century. When a term in Black's traces back only to Blount, treat it as a historical artifact of medieval or early modern legal usage rather than a term with continued common law vitality.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary carries only the shortest possible entry: "To set a price or value on a thing. Blount." This compressed treatment is itself informative — the editors preserved the term for its historical utility in reading old records, not because it had active use in modern practice. The reliance on Blount as the sole authority confirms this.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind shelf offer independent entries on afforare. This is consistent with the term's character: it entered English legal vocabulary through Latinate practice records and never achieved the circulation that would generate multiple dictionary treatments. Researchers should not expect cross-referencing support from other shelf sources and should go directly to Blount's Nomo-Lexicon and to primary medieval legal records when more context is needed.
The absence of the term from later standard legal lexicons — including later editions of Black's where many archaic Latin terms were quietly dropped — reinforces that afforare belongs to the category of terms essential for reading historical documents but obsolete in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is rooted in English legal history and is most likely to appear in records from English ecclesiastical, manorial, or municipal courts. It has no identifiable continuing use in any modern common law jurisdiction.