Definition
To estimate, assess, or tax. In medieval English legal practice, to afforer was to fix or set the price, value, or amount of something by official determination — most commonly used in the context of amercements (monetary penalties), where officers of the court were tasked with assessing a sum proportionate to the offense and the offender's means. The term is a variant of *affeer* or *affeerer*, referring to the same act and the person performing it.
Common Confusion
AFFORER and AFFEER (also AFFEERER, AFFEEROR) are variant spellings of the same root concept and are used interchangeably in historical sources. Burrill himself directs the reader from *afforer* to *afferer*, signaling that these are not meaningfully distinct terms but orthographic variants produced by inconsistent transliteration of Law French across different manuscripts and copyists. Researchers should not treat them as separate legal concepts. Related but distinct: an AMERCEMENT is the penalty being assessed, while to afforer is the act of assessing it, and an AFFEEROR is the person who performs that assessment.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records — manorial court rolls, eyre proceedings, and Year Books — and is effectively obsolete in any living legal system. Researchers encounter it when working with primary sources from the period before standardized spelling, and its principal hazard is orthographic: the same underlying act appears variously as *afforer*, *affeer*, *affeerer*, *affeeror*, *affirer*, and other variants depending on the scribe, the manuscript tradition, and the date of the source. Searching for any single spelling in a corpus will miss occurrences under the others.
The concept matters substantively because the amercement system — and the role of afforers within it — was a significant procedural mechanism in medieval English courts. Magna Carta's provisions against disproportionate amercements gave the afforer's function constitutional weight: the assessment had to be made by "peers" of the offender, and afforers were the practical instrument of that requirement. Corpus researchers working on medieval due process, manorial justice, or the history of fines and penalties will find this term entangled with those larger themes.
Burrill's cross-reference to *afferer* is the key navigational signal: the fuller treatment of the concept in historical dictionaries appears under that spelling, not under *afforer*. Do not expect a standalone substantive entry under this exact spelling in most sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal — a single line defining the term as "to estimate, assess, or tax" with a citation to Kelham's *Norman-French Dictionary* and an immediate redirect to *afferer*. This brevity is itself informative: Burrill treats *afforer* as a secondary spelling variant rather than an independent headword. The substantive content lives under the *affeer* cluster of entries.
Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779), cited by Burrill, is the historical authority for the Law French roots of this vocabulary. Researchers working backward from Burrill to primary sources should consult Kelham directly for the linguistic lineage. No meaningful divergence exists among historical dictionaries on this term because so few bother to index it independently of *affeer*.
What historical dictionaries collectively miss: the procedural context in which afforers operated. The act of afforing was not informal valuation but a structured court function, typically performed by two sworn assessors drawn from those present in court. That institutional dimension is underrepresented in dictionary entries and requires recourse to historical legal scholarship on the amercement system.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no current jurisdictional application. It is confined to the historical common law of England, primarily in manorial and royal court practice from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. It does not appear in American legal practice.