Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning sheep. The word appears in early English legal sources in the context of property, tenancy, and agricultural relations — particularly in matters touching on livestock as the subject of feudal obligations, customary tenure, or pastoral rights.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of *barbits* is terminological recognition. A researcher working through early Year Books, Dyer's reports, or Littleton's *Tenures* in their original or early printed forms may encounter the word without any surrounding gloss. Failing to recognize it as simply "sheep" could obscure the meaning of an entire passage concerning grazing rights, distress of cattle, or the obligations of a customary tenant.
The Dyer and Littleton references in Burrill point to two distinct but related contexts. Littleton's *Tenures* (section 71) deals with villein and customary tenure, where the kinds of animals a tenant held or owed could define the nature of the tenure itself. Dyer's reports, drawn from mid-sixteenth-century common law practice, reflect a period when Law French remained the working language of the English courts and such livestock terms appeared without translation. Researchers using the French edition of Dyer specifically should be alert to the fuller French vocabulary retained there.
More broadly, *barbits* is a reminder that Law French was not a systematic language with stable spelling conventions. Variant spellings are common across manuscripts and printed editions, and a term encountered in one source may appear differently in another without any change in meaning. Normalizing vocabulary across sources is a recurring challenge in research touching the medieval and early modern English common law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal but precise: "L. Fr. Sheep." The two citations — Dyer, 29 (French edition) and Littleton, section 71 — anchor the term in identifiable, authoritative sources. No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to carry a separate entry for *barbits*, which is itself significant: the term was rare enough even in its own time that only a comprehensive Law French glossary effort like Burrill's would think to record it.
The absence of the term from later dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's) reflects the natural attrition of Law French vocabulary from active legal use after the formal prohibition of French in English court proceedings in the eighteenth century. Terms that had no Latin equivalent and no pressing modern utility simply dropped out of the reference literature.
Jurisdictional Note
Relevant only to English legal history. No American or modern common law jurisdiction uses or has used this term in practice.