Definition
An agistor is a person who takes in horses or other animals belonging to others and pastures them for a fee. The relationship is one of bailment for hire: the agistor receives temporary custody of another's livestock in exchange for compensation, and in doing so assumes a limited duty of care over the animals entrusted to them.
The agistor is not an insurer of the animals. Liability attaches only upon a showing of negligence — the agistor must exercise reasonable care appropriate to the circumstances, but is not responsible for loss or injury that occurs without fault. This distinguishes the agistor from carriers and innkeepers, who historically bore stricter obligations.
A secondary historical meaning refers to an officer of the English royal forest charged with overseeing cattle permitted to graze within the forest boundaries and collecting the fees due for that privilege. This officer was sometimes called a gist-taker (corrupted in English usage to guest-taker). This governmental sense is archaic and has no modern legal application.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who agists or takes in cattle to pasture at a certain rate; a pasturer. Also, historically, an officer of the king's forest who managed agisted cattle and collected fees.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; subsumed within the verb "agist" — to take in and feed or pasture livestock for payment.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is not one of contradiction but of precision. Common usage treats the agistor simply as a person who pastures animals for pay. Legal usage carries the term into a specific framework: it identifies the agistor as a bailee, locates the duty of care owed, and distinguishes the agistor's obligations from the stricter liabilities of innkeepers and common carriers. Researchers who encounter the term in a common-usage sense and move to legal sources will find the same core meaning but a substantially more consequential legal structure attached to it.
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Common Confusion
AGISTOR vs. INNKEEPER: Historical sources emphasize the distinction. An innkeeper at common law was bound to receive all travelers who presented themselves and was held to near-absolute liability for loss of a guest's property. The agistor bears neither obligation — there is no duty to accept every animal offered, and liability is fault-based rather than strict. Bouvier explicitly flags this comparison. Researchers analyzing livery stable cases or early boarding cases must be careful not to import innkeeper liability rules into agistment disputes.
AGISTOR vs. COMMON CARRIER: Similar confusion arises with carrier liability. The agistor's duty is that of an ordinary bailee for hire — reasonable care — not the heightened duty of a common carrier. Early case law occasionally tested whether livery stable operators or stock-pen operators should be treated as quasi-carriers; the answer was generally no.
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Why It Matters in Research
Agistor is a term of primarily historical legal significance. It appears in bailment treatises of the 18th and 19th centuries, in early American and English case law involving livestock boarding, and in lien statutes. Researchers working in those periods will encounter it regularly; researchers working in modern commercial contexts will rarely find it outside statutory lien provisions, where some jurisdictions still use "agistment" or "agistor" to ground a possessory lien on livestock for unpaid boarding fees.
Several navigational points for corpus research:
The term indexes into Story on Bailments (§ 443), which is the anchor citation across all three historical dictionary entries. If the Law Mind corpus holds Story's treatise, that section is the primary doctrinal source for the agistor's duties and liability standard.
The Bouvier entry contains a truncated reference ("In the absence of an expr—") that in full reads "in the absence of an express contract." This suggests Bouvier's original text addressed implied contracts in agistment arrangements — a point relevant to fee disputes and lien claims. Researchers should locate the untruncated Bouvier entry.
Case law citations in Bouvier (49 Mo. App. 470; 2 Tex. Civ. App. 188) represent late-19th-century American agistment disputes and offer concrete illustrations of negligence standards applied to livestock bailee relationships.
The agistor's lien — a possessory lien on animals for unpaid feeding and pasturing charges — developed unevenly across American jurisdictions. Some states codified it; others left it at common law or denied it entirely. When researching lien claims in historical livestock cases, the presence or absence of an agistor's lien in a given jurisdiction is outcome-determinative.
The royal forest officer sense of the term appears in English legal antiquities and administrative history. It is unlikely to appear in American legal contexts except in historical surveys of forest law or in English sources predating colonization.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st), Black's (2nd), and Bouvier — offer substantively identical primary definitions, tracking directly to Story on Bailments § 443. This uniformity reflects the treatise's authority on the subject rather than independent analysis by the dictionary compilers.
Bouvier provides meaningfully more than the Black's entries. It supplies the liability standard (negligence, not strict liability), the innkeeper distinction, and case citations grounding the doctrine in American practice. Black's (both editions) strip the entry to its definitional minimum. Researchers should treat the Bouvier entry as the substantive source and the Black's entries as index pointers.
None of the three entries addresses the agistor's lien directly, which is a notable gap. By the time these dictionaries were compiled, lien rights of agistors had become practically significant — the omission likely reflects the dictionaries' focus on definitional rather than remedial content.
The Wiktionary entry preserves the royal forest officer meaning, which the legal dictionaries pass over entirely. That historical meaning is better sourced in Cowell's Interpreter and similar English legal antiquities than in American law dictionaries.
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Jurisdictional Note
American jurisdictions diverged on whether an agistor possessed a common law lien on animals in their care for unpaid charges. English common law recognized the lien; some American courts denied it absent statute. Many states addressed this by enacting agister's lien statutes, which vary in scope, priority rules, and enforcement procedure. The term "agister" (one "i") appears in many of these statutory contexts alongside or instead of "agistor."
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Bailment (for the general framework governing the agistor's duties and liability standard); Liens, Possessory (for the agistor's lien and its treatment across jurisdictions).
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