Definition
To agist. A Latin term from the old law of England meaning to take in and feed cattle or livestock on one's land in exchange for payment. The person performing this service — the agistor — received compensation calculated by the number of animals and duration of grazing, assuming temporary custody of the animals for that purpose. Agistare is the infinitive verb form from which the noun agistment and the agent noun agistor derive. The act describes a specific transaction: the landowner or grazier accepts another's animals onto pasture land for a fee, creating a bailment relationship with corresponding duties of care.
Common Confusion
Agistare is sometimes loosely grouped with general pasturage or common of pasture rights, but these are distinct. Common of pasture was a right to graze one's own animals on another's land — a property right running with tenure. Agistare describes a commercial service transaction, closer to a bailment for hire, in which the agistor receives another's animals and is compensated. One is a right; the other is a service. Conflating them distorts both the property and the contractual dimensions of historical livestock arrangements.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English law, manor court records, or early common law sources will encounter agistare as an operative verb in pleadings and agreements. Its importance lies less in the word itself than in the legal structure it names: the agistment relationship generated questions of liability for strayed, injured, or lost animals, and disputes over agistment payments appeared regularly in manorial and common law courts.
The term surfaces in records well into the seventeenth century, after which agistment (the noun) became the dominant form in legal usage while agistare retreated to Latin pleading contexts. Researchers using English-language sources from the eighteenth century onward may not encounter agistare directly but will find its legal content carried forward under agistment.
Watch for the relationship between agistare and estray law. When agisted animals escaped, questions arose about who bore liability — the agistor or the original owner — and courts developed rules specific to that relationship. These discussions appear in treatises on bailment as well as in agricultural and common law sources.
In fiscal and forest law contexts, agistare had an additional administrative dimension: royal forests were agisted when the Crown permitted subjects to graze animals there for a fee. This use connects agistare to forest law records, Exchequer accounts, and the proceedings of forest courts. Researchers in that area should understand that agistare in a forest law document may refer to a Crown licensing arrangement rather than a private bailment.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary identifies agistare as Latin-derivation terminology from the Norman-influenced legal vocabulary, tracing it to the Norman French gister (to lie, lay, or place) combined with the Latin prefix ad. Burrill's treatment situates the term correctly within its practical context — the receipt of livestock for grazing — and connects it to agistment and agistor as its principal derivatives.
Historical legal dictionaries generally agree on the core meaning. Where they diverge is in emphasis: some sources stress the bailment character of the relationship, while others foreground the pastoral and agricultural context. Neither emphasis is wrong; agistare straddles both areas of law, and a researcher should expect to find it treated under bailment doctrine in one source and under agricultural tenure in another.
What historical dictionaries tend not to address is the forest law usage, which is well documented in primary sources but receives less systematic treatment in the general dictionaries. Manwood's Treatise of the Forest Laws and similar specialized sources are more reliable guides to that dimension of the term.
Jurisdictional Note
Agistare is primarily a term of English common law and has no significant independent development in American legal sources, where agistment (the noun) was adopted but the Latin verb form was not in active use. Researchers in Scottish legal history should note that agistment developed somewhat differently in Scots law, where distinct terminology for grazing arrangements emerged from different feudal roots.