Definition
Aulnager is an alternative spelling of alnager. All substantive content for this office — its duties, historical development, and research implications — is entered under ALNAGER.
Why It Matters in Research
Spelling variation is the primary research hazard here. Historical legal sources, including the editions of Black's represented in this corpus, use both aulnager and alnager without consistency, and Burrill and Rapalje & Lawrence treat both forms as simple cross-references rather than headwords in their own right. Researchers searching digitized historical texts should run queries under both spellings, as well as the variant alneger, which appears in some older English statutes and commentaries. Indexing conventions in period sources were not standardized, and the same document may spell the word differently across sections.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Burrill — treat aulnager as nothing more than a pointer to alnager, offering no independent definition. This unanimity confirms that the spelling distinction carries no legal significance; it is purely orthographic. The variation reflects the broader instability of English legal spelling through the eighteenth century, when French-derived administrative terms had not yet settled into a single accepted form.