Definition
Bobdage is an obsolete English tenure by which certain lands, called "bord lands," were held in exchange for a service of supplying the lord with small provisions. The tenants who held under this arrangement were known as bordarii. The tenure was classed as base — meaning it carried no freehold status — and belonged to the category of customary or villein tenures that characterized much of early medieval English land law.
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Why It Matters in Research
Bobdage appears almost nowhere outside supplemental and historical glossaries, which itself signals how a researcher should approach it. Its presence in a source is a reliable indicator that the source is engaging with pre-Conquest or early post-Conquest English land arrangements, likely drawing on Domesday Book records or secondary works derived from them.
The key research trap is terminological overlap. The underlying land unit — bord land — and the tenant class — bordarii — appear in historical and legal sources more frequently than the tenure name bobdage itself. A researcher searching only for "bobdage" will miss the bulk of relevant material. Searches should run in parallel across "bord land," "bordarii," and "villein tenure" to capture the full documentary record.
Bobdage connects directly to the broader taxonomy of base tenures in English feudal law. Understanding where it sits — below freehold, within the villein tenure cluster, distinguished by its specific provisioning service — requires familiarity with the surrounding tenure categories: villeinage, socage, and the various gradations of customary service. The provisioning nature of the service (small provisions for the lord's household) is the defining functional characteristic and distinguishes bobdage from tenure arrangements premised on agricultural labor, military service, or rent payment.
Because the tenure is extinct and purely historical, it has no ongoing jurisdictional relevance. It surfaces in research primarily in three contexts: (1) historical studies of Domesday England and Anglo-Norman land arrangements; (2) legal history scholarship on the development of English tenure doctrine; and (3) interpretive work on old deeds, grants, or chronicles that reference bord lands.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the only dictionary entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term. The entry is brief: bobdage is identified as a species of base tenure, the lands held under it called bord lands, the tenants bordarii, and the service defined as keeping the lord in small provisions.
No other historical dictionary in the corpus covers this term independently, which is consistent with its extreme antiquity and narrow historical footprint. Black's supplemental placement — rather than main text inclusion — reflects the term's status as a historical curiosity rather than a term of active legal art even at the time of the dictionary's compilation in the early twentieth century.
The definition Black's provides is functional but spare. It does not address how bobdage related to the Domesday survey's categorization of bordarii, nor does it engage with scholarly debate over whether bordarii held a distinct legal status from villeins or cottagers. Researchers needing more than the bare legal label will need to move beyond the dictionary record into historical and antiquarian sources.
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Jurisdictional Note
Bobdage is a tenure of English law with no parallel development in other common law jurisdictions. It has no application in American, Canadian, Australian, or other common law systems, and no modern English law relevance. Research use is confined to English legal history.
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