Definition
A Latin term appearing in early English legal records meaning to plough or cultivate land. In medieval agrarian law, arare described the physical act of tilling or breaking soil, and the term surfaces in documents governing manorial obligations, customary tenure, and agricultural services owed by tenants to lords. It is closely related to the English dialectal words "ear" and "are," both of which carried the same agricultural sense.
The term has no operative significance in modern law and appears almost exclusively in the context of reading historical land records, manor court rolls, and feudal tenure instruments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A Japanese confection made from small pieces of mochi (glutinous rice cakes) that are fried and usually flavored with soy sauce.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The English cognates "ear" and "are" (to plough or till) were already archaic by the nineteenth century.
The legal and common-language senses share no connection whatsoever. A researcher encountering "arare" in a historical English legal manuscript is reading a Latin agricultural term; the Japanese confection is an entirely unrelated word of different linguistic origin. The risk of confusion is essentially zero in practice, but worth flagging for researchers who surface the term through general reference tools.
Why It Matters in Research
Arare belongs to the vocabulary of feudal land tenure and will appear, if at all, in Anglo-Norman and early Middle English manorial records, plea rolls, and customary surveys — sources such as extents, custumals, and inquisitions post mortem. Researchers working in this stratum of the Law Mind corpus should treat arare as a marker of agricultural service obligations, likely appearing alongside terms for other labor duties (ploughing, harrowing, carting) owed under villeinage or customary tenure arrangements.
The principal research trap is terminological overlap: arare as a Latin infinitive ("to plough") must be distinguished from arare appearing as a conjugated or gerundive form in other contexts. Transcription errors in nineteenth-century calendar abstracts occasionally render the term inconsistently, sometimes as "arere" or "erare," reflecting the Anglo-Norman scribal variants noted by Burrill.
Because the term describes a service rather than a legal right or remedy, it rarely appears as the operative word in a legal instrument's dispositive clause. It is more commonly found in the recital or schedule of services, making it easy to overlook in summary abstracts that omit those portions.
Researchers interested in the legal framework governing these ploughing obligations should follow the thread into related tenure vocabulary — boon-work, week-work, and the broader structure of villein services — rather than treating arare as a standalone legal concept.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only historical legal dictionary entry identified for this term. Burrill's treatment is minimal: he supplies the Latin form, the Anglo-Norman variants (arer, erer), and the English equivalents "ear" and "are," without elaborating on the legal contexts in which the term appears or the consequences attached to failure of the service.
No entry appears in Black's or Bouvier's dictionaries, which is consistent with the term's character as a piece of specialist medieval agrarian vocabulary rather than a term of art with doctrinal weight. The absence from later dictionaries reflects the obsolescence of feudal tenure vocabulary rather than any ambiguity about meaning; by the time American legal dictionaries were compiled, villeinage and its associated service obligations had long ceased to generate litigation.
Researchers should not read the sparse dictionary treatment as evidence of marginal importance in its own era. Ploughing services were among the most economically significant obligations in the manorial system, and the vocabulary describing them, including arare, was precise and well understood by medieval practitioners.