Definition
An under constable; a minor peace officer subordinate to a constable. The term appears in historical English legal usage to describe a low-ranking officer in the constabulary hierarchy, below the constable proper but exercising some limited law enforcement functions within a locality.
Common Confusion
BOROW should not be confused with terms in the surety and pledge family derived from the Old English "borh" (pledge, surety), such as MAINBOUR or BORGH. Although etymologically related concepts may underlie both families of words, in its constabulary sense BOROW refers to a peace officer, not a pledgor or surety. The phonetic and orthographic similarity creates a real research trap in manuscript sources where context must be used to distinguish an officer designation from a suretyship term.
Why It Matters in Research
BOROW is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in early English legal sources and historical documents concerning local government and parish-level law enforcement. It has no meaningful modern counterpart and does not appear in contemporary statutory or case law. Researchers working in pre-modern English legal history, manorial records, or early constabulary organization should be alert to variant spellings — the term may appear as "borow," "borowe," or in forms related to the broader "borgh" or "borh" family of words denoting surety and local pledge relationships, which creates a genuine risk of confusion with unrelated suretyship concepts.
The single surviving dictionary gloss traces to Cowell's Interpreter, a seventeenth-century legal glossary, which is itself the likely ultimate source for Rapalje & Lawrence. Researchers should treat this citation chain with caution: Cowell's definitions of obsolete offices are sometimes more antiquarian than precise, and the term may reflect regional usage rather than a uniform national office. Anyone tracing the actual duties or authority of a borow should consult primary manorial and parish records rather than relying solely on dictionary lineage.
Note also that Rapalje & Lawrence's entry for BOROW appears to have been disrupted in transcription — the dictionary text runs directly into entries for unrelated terms (THINGS, THINGS DONE IN PURSUANCE OF AN ACT), suggesting a printing or digitization artifact. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should be aware that surrounding text in this portion of Rapalje & Lawrence may not be contextually related to BOROW itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence defines BOROW solely as "an under constable," citing Cowell. This is a thin entry, and no elaboration on duties, appointment, or jurisdiction is provided. The reliance on Cowell places the definition squarely in the seventeenth-century English legal glossary tradition, where many minor local offices were catalogued with minimal functional description.
Wharton, Bouvier, and Black's (early editions) do not appear to carry a corresponding entry, which suggests the term was recognized as sufficiently obscure or archaic even by nineteenth-century American compilers to warrant omission. Its absence from American dictionaries is consistent with the term's non-reception into U.S. law — the constable office was transplanted to the colonies and early states, but subordinate terminology like "borow" did not follow.
Researchers should note that Cowell's Interpreter was itself a controversial work — it was ordered suppressed by Parliament in 1610 for its treatment of royal prerogative — and its definitions of minor offices reflect the legal landscape of early Stuart England rather than any later settled usage.
Jurisdictional Note
BOROW as a legal term of art has no recognized place in American, Scottish, or Irish law. It is properly understood as a term of historical English local government, operative (if at all) within the English parish and manorial system. Researchers outside the English historical context will not encounter it in operative legal sources.