Definition
In old English law, the person who has been robbed or otherwise deprived of money or goods by theft, and who gives surety to prosecute the felon with "fresh suit" — that is, immediate pursuit of the offender following the crime. The bere was not merely a victim; the term carried a procedural obligation. By offering surety to prosecute, the bere formally committed to pursuing the case through the hue and cry mechanism that characterized early English criminal procedure.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Barley, especially four-rowed or six-rowed barley; a grain crop term still used in Scottish and Northern English agricultural contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An obsolete verb meaning to pierce, attributed to Chaucer.
Neither the agricultural nor the archaic verbal sense bears any relationship to the legal term. The identical spelling is coincidental. A researcher encountering "bere" in a historical legal manuscript should not assume any connection to the grain or the verb; context will make the legal meaning clear, but the risk of misreading exists in interdisciplinary or literary-legal archives.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially defunct outside of historical legal scholarship. It appears almost exclusively in Anglo-Norman and early common law sources predating the systematization of criminal procedure. Researchers working in medieval English law, particularly materials touching on the hue and cry, appeal of felony, or early prosecutorial suretyship, may encounter it in Bracton and related treatises.
The key research trap is the fresh suit requirement embedded in the definition. "Fresh suit" (also rendered as "fresh pursuit") was not a courtesy — it was a procedural prerequisite. A victim who delayed pursuit forfeited certain legal standing and remedies. The bere's obligation to give surety signals that early English law treated prosecution of felony as a quasi-private duty of the aggrieved party, not yet fully absorbed into a public prosecutorial framework. Understanding bere therefore requires understanding the adjacent mechanics of hue and cry and the appeal of felony.
Researchers should note that the Bracton citation (fol. 154b) appearing in both editions of Black's refers to Henry de Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, the authoritative thirteenth-century treatise on English common law. This is one of the few primary sources where the term appears with any systematic treatment.
Jurisdictional variation is not a meaningful consideration here; the term belongs entirely to pre-modern English law and has no parallel development in American, Scottish, or other common law systems.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's are in precise agreement, differing only in a minor typographic variant (fol. 154b vs. fol. 1546, the latter almost certainly a printing error in the first edition). Neither edition provides more than a single sentence of definition, reflecting the term's extreme narrowness and its status as a historical curiosity rather than a working legal concept.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural architecture surrounding the bere. The surety requirement, the fresh suit obligation, and the relationship between the bere's duty and the communal hue and cry system are left entirely to inference. Researchers should treat both Black's entries as a starting point requiring supplementation from Bracton directly and from secondary scholarship on early English criminal procedure.
No divergence between the editions is substantively meaningful.