Definition
An Anglo-Norman legal term denoting the monetary value placed on a person's life — the price of the head or person (*capitis pretium*). Chefe is a synonym for *were* or *weregild*, the compensatory payment owed to the kin of a slain person under early Germanic and Norman customary law. The amount was fixed according to the victim's rank and social status, and its payment discharged the legal obligation arising from the killing, foreclosing the right of the victim's family to pursue blood vengeance.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Chefe" does not appear in modern standard English dictionaries. In contemporary Portuguese and Spanish, *chefe* means "chief" or "boss" — a leader or person in authority. This meaning is entirely unrelated to the legal term.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term had no recognized common English meaning by the nineteenth century.
Editorial note: The superficial resemblance to words meaning "head" or "chief" in Romance languages is not coincidental — both derive from Latin *caput* (head) — but the legal term carries a specific technical sense of monetary valuation, not authority or rank. A researcher encountering "chefe" in an Anglo-Norman legal document should not interpret it as a reference to a leader or officer.
Common Confusion
Chefe is closely associated with *weregild* (also spelled *wergeld*, *wergild*, *were*) and the terms are functionally interchangeable in the sources. However, *weregild* appears far more frequently in both historical legal literature and modern secondary scholarship, while *chefe* is a narrower Anglo-Norman French form found principally in post-Conquest English legal texts. Researchers should not assume that the absence of "chefe" in an index means the concept is absent — the same institution will almost certainly appear under weregild, were, or related headings.
Why It Matters in Research
Chefe is a low-frequency term confined to Anglo-Norman legal sources and the dictionaries that draw from them. It will not appear in modern statutory or case law. Its research value is entirely historical: the term marks the intersection of pre-Conquest Germanic custom (weregild) with Norman French legal vocabulary, and its presence in a document helps date and locate the source within the early post-Conquest common law tradition.
Researchers working in Anglo-Norman legal texts should be alert to terminological inconsistency. The sources in the Law Mind corpus — including Burrill — embed *chefe* within a cluster of related Anglo-Norman terms (*cheir*, *cheyt*, *chet*) that deal with abatement, forfeiture, and procedural events. These are distinct concepts. Burrill's entry runs them together typographically, which can mislead a reader skimming the passage into treating them as related legal ideas when they are merely adjacent entries.
The concept underlying chefe — compositional payment for homicide — is foundational to understanding early English criminal and civil law before the emergence of the Crown's monopoly on criminal prosecution. Weregild gradually displaced by royal fines and appeals of felony is a trajectory that runs through the entire formative period of common law. Chefe, as a term, drops out of use well before the classical common law consolidates, which is why it appears in the historical dictionaries but has no footprint in modern legal usage.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three dictionary sources agree precisely: chefe means *were* or *weregild*, glossed as *capitis pretium* — the price of the head or person. There is no divergence on meaning. Black's (first and second editions) and Burrill reproduce essentially the same entry, reflecting a shared reliance on early Norman law sources, with Burrill citing *Leges Gulielmi Conquestoris* (the Laws of William the Conqueror) directly.
The historical dictionaries treat chefe as a simple gloss entry rather than a term requiring substantive analysis. They do not discuss the social mechanics of weregild — how amounts were calculated, how payment was enforced, or how the institution declined — because that context belongs to legal history rather than dictionary definition. Researchers who need the institutional picture will find the dictionaries thin and should supplement with secondary sources on Anglo-Saxon and Norman customary law.
Jurisdictional Note
Chefe and the weregild system it describes were specific to the Anglo-Norman legal tradition and have no direct counterpart in modern common law jurisdictions. The term is of purely historical relevance and carries no operative legal meaning in any current jurisdiction.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Weregild; Anglo-Norman Law; Compositional Payments in Early English Law.