Definition
A Latin term from feudal law meaning "they plowed." *Arabant* appears in Domesday Book and related medieval records to describe a class of villein tenants bound to perform agricultural labor service — specifically plowing and harrowing — on the lord's demesne land as a condition of their tenure. The full phrase most commonly encountered is *arabant et herciabant ad curiam domini*: "they plowed and harrowed at the lord's court," meaning within the lord's manor. The term identifies tenure by agricultural service rather than by payment of rent or military obligation.
Why It Matters in Research
*Arabant* is a Domesday Book term. Researchers encountering it will almost exclusively do so in two contexts: transcriptions or translations of Domesday Book entries, and secondary scholarship on Anglo-Norman feudal tenure and villeinage. It does not appear in modern statutory or case law and has no living legal application.
The critical navigational point is the phrase *ad curiam domini*. Historical dictionaries gloss this as "at the lord's court," but as Burrill clarifies, the phrase means within the lord's manor — *curia* here carries the sense of a manorial precinct, not a judicial tribunal. Researchers accustomed to *curia* in its judicial sense (as in *curia regis*) should note this distinction carefully; conflating the two meanings distorts the character of the tenure being described.
*Arabant* connects directly to the broader corpus of feudal tenure terminology. The obligation it describes is a species of *villein service* or *base tenure* — labor owed to the lord in exchange for land — and sits within the larger framework of tenure by *socage*, *villeinage*, and *customary tenure*. Understanding *arabant* requires understanding where agricultural service tenures fell in the feudal hierarchy, and how Domesday Book recorded those obligations as a snapshot of tenure at the time of the Conquest and its immediate aftermath.
Researchers using this term as a search term should be aware that variant spellings and Latin conjugations (*arabant*, *arabat*, *arant*) appear across medieval sources, and that Domesday Book itself is not uniform in its phrasing.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: a Latin plural past tense verb meaning "they plowed," applied in feudal law to tenants holding by agricultural labor service on the lord's lands. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) offer identical, brief entries attributed to Cowell — John Cowell's *Interpreter* (1607), a standard early reference for feudal terminology.
Burrill adds meaningful depth. His entry supplies the full Latin phrase *arabant et herciabant ad curiam domini* and identifies Spelman — Sir Henry Spelman's *Glossarium Archaeologicum* — as the authority, which is a more primary source than Cowell for Domesday-era terminology. Burrill also clarifies the manorial meaning of *curia*, which neither Black's edition addresses. For historical research, Burrill's entry is the more useful of the three.
No source addresses the distinction between *arabant* as a description of actual labor performed versus as a statement of tenure obligation — a distinction relevant to understanding how Domesday scribes used the term. Researchers should consult Maitland's *Domesday Book and Beyond* (1897) for fuller analysis of how labor service obligations were recorded and interpreted in that survey.
Jurisdictional Note
*Arabant* is specific to Anglo-Norman feudal law as recorded in English sources, principally Domesday Book. It has no application in Scottish, Irish, or continental legal traditions as a technical term, though analogous agricultural service tenures existed throughout medieval Europe under different terminology.