Definition
To joust or tilt; to participate in a tournament or trial by combat in the formal, chivalric sense. The term appears in medieval English legal records in connection with the regulated conduct of tournaments, which were subject to royal licensing and oversight in the feudal period. Derived from Latin legal usage (borda, a club or staff), bordeare describes the physical act of mounted combat in a structured tournament setting, not private violence or duel.
Why It Matters in Research
Bordeare is an archaic term of narrow application, found almost exclusively in sources dealing with medieval tournament law, feudal regulation of arms, and the early history of English licensing of martial exercises. Researchers encountering it in old English legal records or statutes should understand that tournaments occupied a legally distinct space: they required royal permission, participants were subject to rules enforced by the crown, and fatalities arising from them raised distinct questions of criminal liability compared to ordinary homicide or duel.
The term will not appear in modern legal materials. It surfaces chiefly in antiquarian and historical commentary, including Daines Barrington's Observations on the More Ancient Statutes (cited by Burrill), which remains the primary secondary source connecting bordeare to its statutory context. Researchers using Law Mind's historical corpus should treat sightings of this term as markers pointing toward feudal tournament regulation, crown licensing of arms, and the broader category of medieval martial law rather than any continuing legal doctrine.
Do not conflate this term with references to bordage, bordarii, or similar-sounding feudal tenure terms, which concern land holding and villein status, not combat.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive historical dictionary treatment of bordeare, defining it as to joust or take part in a tournament, and grounding it in Latin legal Latin with a citation to Barrington's Observations on the More Ancient Statutes. Burrill runs the entry directly into bordhalfpenny — a separate term for market-stall fees — without elaboration, suggesting that even by Burrill's time bordeare was sufficiently obscure to warrant only passing notice.
No treatment appears in Bouvier, Black's early editions, or Jacob's Law Dictionary at the level of detail that would add to Burrill's account. The absence of this term from those standard dictionaries reinforces its character as a term of purely historical and antiquarian significance, rather than one carrying practical legal weight even in the nineteenth century. Researchers should not expect cross-dictionary synthesis on this term; Burrill and Barrington represent the effective limits of the documented record.