Definition
A Law French term used in old English legal practice meaning to award, adjudge, or determine; also, to sentence or condemn. AGARDER was the formal verb of judicial action — the word by which a court pronounced its judgment, awarded a writ, or condemned a party. It appears in early Year Book entries and in statutory materials from the period of the Statute of Westminster, functioning as the operative word signaling that a tribunal had reached and expressed its decision.
Why It Matters in Research
AGARDER is a term of pure historical interest, belonging to the Law French vocabulary of medieval English courts. Researchers working in Year Books, early plea rolls, or pre-modern treatises will encounter it as a marker of judicial action — its appearance typically signals that a formal award, judgment, or condemnation follows. Because it functioned as a term of art in pleading and judgment records, its precise position in a text matters: AGARDER (or its inflected forms such as AGARDONS or AGARDOMUS) introduces the operative disposition of a case, not merely a recital of the proceedings.
The key navigational point is that this term does not survive into modern legal usage in any form. No modern equivalent uses the word itself. Researchers should treat it as a signal to look for the substance of the judgment in the clause that immediately follows. Burrill's entry is the richest source here, supplying actual examples from the Year Books and from Fleta, and is the preferred starting point for understanding how the term was deployed in context. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence offer only brief glosses that confirm the meaning but add little texture.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in full agreement on the core meaning: to award, adjudge, or determine; to sentence or condemn. No source disputes this. The divergence is in depth of treatment.
Burrill's Law Dictionary is substantially more useful than the others. It situates AGARDER in old practice, provides two direct quotations illustrating its use — one from the Statute of Westminster I (c. 44) and one from the Registrum Omnium Brevium — and supplies the inflected first-person plural form AGARDOMUS ("we award") drawn from the Year Books of 6 Edward III. Burrill also notes the condemnation sense with a concrete example: "Il fuit agard al Flete" — he was adjudged to the Fleet (Prison) — drawn from Fleta, the late thirteenth-century legal treatise. This usage confirms that AGARDER carried both the civil sense of awarding judgment and the penal sense of sentencing to custody or punishment.
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence present identical or near-identical one-line definitions and add nothing beyond the bare gloss. Rapalje & Lawrence runs the entry directly into AGE without a break, suggesting that the compilers treated AGARDER as a term requiring only minimal acknowledgment. Researchers should not rely on those entries for anything beyond definitional confirmation.
No historical dictionary flags any ambiguity or contested usage, and none provides a case citation beyond Burrill's statutory and Year Book references.