Definition
A fold, pen, or enclosed place where cattle lie or are kept. The term appears in English legal records in the context of manorial land use and the rights attached to grazing and enclosure. It refers to a physical structure or designated area on an estate used to shelter or contain livestock, particularly cattle.
Why It Matters in Research
CONCUBARIA is a term encountered almost exclusively in early English manorial records, land surveys, and documents touching on agrarian rights. Researchers consulting medieval or early modern title documents, court rolls, or descriptions of manorial appurtenances may encounter the term as a named feature of an estate, carrying implications about the land's use and possibly about attached rights such as common of pasture or the lord's right to fold cattle on tenant land.
The term itself is rare in American legal sources and carries no doctrinal weight in modern U.S. or U.K. law. If you encounter it in a historical source, treat it as descriptive of a physical enclosure rather than a legal right in itself — though the existence of a concubaria on a parcel could be evidence relevant to proving historical land use, prescriptive rights, or the extent of a manor's agricultural operations.
Researchers should be alert to the possibility that manorial documents describe a concubaria in connection with the fold-course — a lord's exclusive right to fold tenant sheep or cattle overnight on demesne land, which fertilized the soil. The concubaria and the fold-course are related concepts but distinct: the former is the structure or place, the latter is the right.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are in complete agreement on this term. Black's Law Dictionary (both editions), Bouvier's Law Dictionary, and Rapalje & Lawrence all define concubaria identically as "a fold, pen, or place where cattle lie," each attributing the definition to Cowell — meaning John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), a foundational English legal dictionary of the early modern period. Bouvier additionally cites Wharton, suggesting the term was carried forward through successive English legal glossaries without modification.
The unanimity across sources reflects the term's narrow, technical, and essentially historical nature. None of the dictionaries elaborate on legal rights or proceedings to which concubaria attached, which signals that even by the era of these compilations, the term was understood as a Latin descriptor from older records rather than an active term of legal art. The brevity of every entry is itself informative: these compilers treated the word as requiring translation, not interpretation.
The absence of any reference to case law or statutory treatment in any of these sources confirms that concubaria never developed an independent doctrinal life in the common law tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no operative significance in any modern jurisdiction. It is relevant only in the context of English legal history and the interpretation of historical manorial documents. Researchers working with Scottish, Welsh, or Irish land records should not assume identical usage without independent verification.