Definition
Bordimanni is a Latin term from old English law denoting bordmen — a class of dependent agricultural tenants who occupied and worked small holdings, typically in exchange for labor services owed to a lord. The term is closely associated with bordarii, the more commonly recorded variant, and describes the same or a substantially similar category of unfree or semi-free cultivators found in the manorial system of medieval England. Bordimanni appears primarily in early legal and historical records and is not a term of modern legal significance.
Common Confusion
Bordimanni and bordarii should be treated as functionally equivalent terms referring to the same class of manorial tenant. Researchers must not infer a legal distinction between them based on the difference in spelling. The variant borduanni, flagged by Burrill as an erroneous form, should not be construed as a third distinct category. All three forms collapse into a single historical referent.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with early English land records, Domesday-era documents, or treatises on feudal tenure will encounter bordimanni as a variant spelling of bordarii, and the two must be treated as referring to the same underlying class of persons. Confusion between variant spellings is a documented hazard: Burrill explicitly flags that bordimanni is sometimes erroneously written borduanni, meaning a copyist or transcription error could produce a form that appears entirely unrelated to the bordarii entry. Researchers who encounter borduanni in a manuscript or printed source should treat it as a likely corruption of bordimanni, not as an independent term.
The term appears in Coke's commentary on Littleton and in Blount's law glossary, both of which are represented in the Law Mind historical corpus. Cross-referencing the bordarii entry is essential, as Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum — cited by Burrill — provides the more developed treatment of this class of tenant. Because bordimanni and bordarii appear in different sources and under different headwords, a search confined to one term will miss relevant material under the other.
This is a historically bounded term with no modern common law application. Its research value is confined to interpreting medieval land instruments, reconstructing manorial structures, and understanding the gradations of unfreedom and tenure obligation that characterized English feudalism before the consolidation of common law property categories.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential entry: bordimanni are bordmen, with Spelman cited as the primary authority and Coke on Littleton and Blount given as additional sources. The entry is brief and purely referential, pointing the researcher immediately to bordarii as the controlling headword. Burrill's note that the term is sometimes erroneously written borduanni is a useful editorial caution — it signals active manuscript variation and is the kind of practical warning that is often omitted from more formal legal dictionaries.
No significant divergence exists among historical dictionary sources on this term, largely because it is a narrow variant entry rather than a term of disputed legal content. The historical sources agree on the referent (bordmen, a dependent agricultural class) and on the preferred spelling (bordarii over bordimanni). What the historical dictionaries do not provide is social or economic context for this class of tenant — that material must be sought in legal historians and in Spelman's glossary directly.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Feudal Tenure; Manorial System; Villeinage