Definition
An obsolete Law French term meaning arms, armor, or armed men. Appearing in medieval legal texts and early common law records, armure denoted either the physical equipment of a fighting man (weapons and protective gear) or, collectively, the body of armed persons bearing such equipment. The term has no continuing independent legal significance and survives only in historical legal sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A fabric woven with a raised pattern resembling chain mail.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Armor (obsolete); also a variety of twilled fabric ribbed on the surface.
The textile meaning of armure — a woven fabric with a chain-mail-like surface — is entirely unrelated to its legal sense. A researcher encountering armure in a historical legal document should not import any textile connotation; the legal usage is strictly martial and administrative.
Why It Matters in Research
Armure is the kind of term that surfaces in medieval plea rolls, feudal tenure records, and early English legal proceedings without explanation, because its meaning was transparent to contemporary readers. Researchers working in Law French sources should treat it as a functional equivalent to the Latin arma or the English "arms and armor," depending on context.
Two traps are worth flagging. First, armure can denote either the physical objects (weapons, armor) or the men bearing them — the collective sense. Context usually resolves the ambiguity, but records dealing with feudal military obligations or array commissions may use the term either way. Second, because the word fell out of active legal use before the major consolidation of English legal vocabulary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most standard common law dictionaries of that era do not carry it. Researchers who encounter armure in a source and turn to Coke, Blackstone, or later English dictionaries will find no guidance there; Kelham's Norman-French dictionary (cited by Burrill) is the appropriate reference point.
For corpus researchers, armure clusters with related terms in records touching feudal military service, commissions of array, the law of arms, and early writs concerning the keeping or bearing of weapons. It is unlikely to appear in equity, commercial, or ecclesiastical records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary carries only a brief entry: "L. Fr. Arms; armor; armed men. Kelham." This is consistent with the term's status as a functional gloss rather than a term of art with contested legal meaning. Burrill adds no elaboration because none was needed — armure described a factual condition (being armed, or the equipment of war) rather than a legal category with defined elements or consequences.
Kelham's Glossary of Norman and Old French Words (the source Burrill cites) is the principal reference for this term in the legal historical tradition. No meaningful divergence exists among the sources that carry the term; the disagreement, such as it is, is simply between sources that include it and the majority of later dictionaries that do not.
The Webster's 1913 entry confirming the textile meaning as a distinct usage illustrates how the surface similarity between legal armure and the fabric term is purely coincidental — a convergence of spelling across unrelated concepts, not a single term with dual development.