Definition
In old English and medieval Latin legal usage, *affurare* is a Latin verb meaning to affeer — that is, to assess or fix the amount of an amercement (a monetary penalty) after it has been imposed in general terms by a court. Where a court determined that a party should be amerced "at the mercy of the court," the precise sum was subsequently set by affeerers, and the act of so fixing the amount was recorded in Latin as *affuratus* or *affuratus fuit* (he was affeered). The term is the Latinized form of the Anglo-French and Middle English legal verb "to affeer," and it appears in medieval English court records and Year Books as a technical term of pleading and procedure.
Common Confusion
*Affurare* should not be confused with *abjurare* (to abjure, renounce, or swear off) or *adjurare* (to swear solemnly), despite the superficial similarity in ending. Nor should it be confused with general terms of oath-taking, with which it shares no meaning. The confusion most likely to arise in reading medieval records is between *affurare* and *affirmare* (to affirm or confirm): both appear in abbreviated Latin court hand, but they describe entirely different procedural acts — the one is a financial assessment, the other a confirmation or affirmation.
Why It Matters in Research
*Affurare* appears almost exclusively in medieval English court records, plea rolls, and Year Books written in Law Latin, the artificial Latin of English legal practice. Researchers working in these sources need to recognize the term as a procedural notation, not a substantive legal right or claim. Several practical points:
**Record identification.** When a plea roll or Year Book entry reads *affuratus fuit ad [sum]*, it signals the completion of an amercement process — the court has not merely threatened a penalty but has had it formally assessed. This distinction matters for understanding whether a financial obligation was liquidated or still contingent.
**Relationship to amercement procedure.** The full cycle visible in medieval records runs: imposition of amercement (in mercy of the court) → appointment of affeerers → affeerment (*affuratio*) → enrollment of the assessed sum. *Affurare* marks the third step. Recognizing this sequence prevents misreading an *affuratus* entry as a fresh judgment rather than the completion of an earlier one.
**Corpus connections.** The term connects directly to the broader cluster of amercement vocabulary: *amerciamentum*, *misericordia*, *affeerer*, and *afferement*. Researchers who encounter *affurare* in a source will almost always need those companion terms to reconstruct the full procedural picture.
**Rarity and source limitation.** Because *affurare* is a technical Latin form used within a narrow window of English legal history (roughly the 12th through 15th centuries), it disappears from practice as Law Latin gave way to Law French and later to English. Searching for the term in post-medieval legal literature will return little of value; the productive corpus is the plea rolls, eyre rolls, and Year Books of medieval England.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among standard historical legal dictionaries. Burrill is characteristically terse: he gives the Latin tag, notes the English law context, and supplies the Year Book citation — *Yearb. H. 4 Edw.* — without further gloss. The citation refers to the Year Books of Henry IV or Edward (the abbreviation is compressed), illustrating that the term was recorded in active use in medieval court reports. Burrill's definition, that *affurare* means "to affeer," is accurate but assumes the reader already knows what affeering means; it offers no further explanation of the underlying process.
No entry for *affurare* appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or Black's Law Dictionary in any edition, reflecting the term's narrow and archaic scope. Researchers should not expect modern legal dictionaries to carry it. The Latinized form is better traced through glossaries of medieval Latin and through Maitland and Pollock's historical work on English legal procedure, which treats amercement practice in detail, than through standard legal lexicons.