Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "bought" or "purchased." Chate appears in early English legal sources as a past participial form relating to the act of buying, and is closely connected to the terms achate and achater, which denote purchasing or provisions obtained by purchase. In medieval legal and administrative contexts, the term surfaced in records concerning household provisioning, purveyance, and the acquisition of goods.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To cheat; to deceive or defraud.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately listed; "cheat" in Webster's 1913 appears primarily as a noun or verb denoting fraud or deception, with secondary reference to the escheat of lands.
The gap here is significant and potentially misleading. The modern English word "cheat" — meaning to defraud — is etymologically and orthographically close to chate, but the legal term carries no fraudulent connotation whatsoever. Chate means simply "bought." A researcher encountering chate in a historical legal record should resist any instinct to read it as implying deception.
Common Confusion
Chate is easily misread as an early spelling of "cheat" in the fraud sense. This is a false cognate trap. The legal term derives from the Law French achater (to buy, to purchase) and is semantically unrelated to the common English "cheat" meaning deception. Separately, "cheat" in its legal-historical sense referred to escheat — the forfeiture of property to the crown or lord — a meaning likewise distinct from chate. Researchers working in medieval English court rolls, household accounts, or Year Book materials should be alert to all three meanings depending on context.
Why It Matters in Research
Chate is a low-frequency term that surfaces almost exclusively in medieval English legal and administrative records — household rolls, purveyance records, and early common law materials written in Law French. Its practical research value is almost entirely as a reading aid: encountering the term in a primary source and knowing it means "bought" rather than "cheated" can change the interpretation of a record entirely.
Burrill's entry is a redirect entry, pointing researchers to achate and achater as the substantive terms. Any researcher who needs to understand the legal framework around purchasing, purveyance, or provisioning in the medieval English context should follow that cross-reference rather than treating chate as a standalone concept.
Because Law French sources are not uniformly indexed or searchable by modern keyword tools, variant spellings — including chate, achate, chaté — may appear inconsistently across manuscript transcriptions and printed Year Book editions. Do not assume a single spelling will capture all relevant instances.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides only a spare entry: "L. Fr. Bought. Kelham. See Achate, Achater." The attribution to Kelham refers to Robert Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), which remains a primary reference for Law French terminology in English legal sources. Burrill does not expand on the term beyond the redirect.
No other major historical legal dictionaries — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions — appear to carry a standalone entry for chate, which confirms its status as a minor term of art whose substance lives in its cognate entries. Researchers should consult Kelham directly for fuller treatment of the achate family of terms.