Definition
Law French phrase meaning "of flesh and blood." The phrase appeared in the formula *affaire rechat de char et de sank*, used in legal proceedings to claim that a person was a villein — a serf bound to a lord under the feudal tenure system of medieval England. The claim asserted a proprietary right over another person based on hereditary servile status, grounded in the biological tie of blood descent. The phrase carried legal weight because villeinage was inherited: to show that a person was "of flesh and blood" from a villein stock was to demonstrate that the lord's claim of ownership had a legal basis recognized by the common law courts of the period.
Common Language
The component words have ordinary meanings that are transparent on their face: "flesh" and "blood" in common usage denote the physical body and biological kinship, respectively. In modern English, "flesh and blood" is a familiar idiom meaning a biological relative or, more broadly, a living human being.
The legal meaning, however, is not merely metaphorical. In the context of villein tenure, "of flesh and blood" was a term of art within a formal pleading formula. It was not an appeal to humanity or kinship in the sentimental sense, but a precise legal claim: that the person's body — and the labor and property attached to it — belonged to the lord by right of hereditary status. The phrase converted a biological fact into a property claim. That is the gap a researcher must hold in view.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is a relic of a specific procedural moment in English legal history — the reign of Edward II (1307–1327) — and it appears in Year Book sources, not in common law treatises or statutes that survive in well-indexed modern collections. Researchers encountering it should be aware of several traps.
First, the phrase appears in Law French, a legal dialect that diverged substantially from spoken French and is not reliably parsed by general French-language tools or dictionaries. *Char* for "flesh" and *sank* for "blood" are standard Law French forms, but the spelling varies across manuscripts and printed Year Book editions. Variant spellings — *chare*, *sanc*, *sang* — may appear in parallel sources without cross-referencing.
Second, the procedural context is villeinage litigation, a category of medieval property and status law that had largely disappeared from living English practice by the mid-sixteenth century. Sources treating it are overwhelmingly historical; any corpus materials will be pre-modern. Researchers studying the legal history of servitude, feudal tenure, or the decline of villeinage in England will find this phrase a useful marker for locating relevant Year Book passages.
Third, the phrase connects to broader questions about status-based legal claims and the relationship between biological descent and legal personhood — themes that intersect with later legal developments in both English and colonial American law concerning hereditary servitude. The intellectual lineage is worth tracing, though direct doctrinal continuity is limited.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Burrill's — carry identical or near-identical entries, each tracing the phrase to the Year Book of 1 Edward II (Y. B. P. 1 Edw. II, p. 4). This is a genuine historical source: the Year Books of Edward II's reign were printed and edited in the early modern period and survive in legal antiquarian collections.
The agreement across all three dictionaries is unsurprising given that Black's drew heavily on Burrill's for Law French and Latin terms. None of the three entries elaborates on the procedural mechanics of the claim or situates the phrase within the broader law of villeinage. Researchers should not treat these dictionary entries as a sufficient account of the doctrine; they are signposts to the Year Books, not substitutes for them.
What the historical dictionaries collectively omit: any discussion of how such claims were adjudicated, what evidence satisfied the courts, or how villeinage pleading related to the writ system more broadly. For that context, Bracton's *De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae* and Britton remain the foundational treatise sources.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no living jurisdictional application. It is relevant exclusively to the legal history of medieval England. Researchers working on comparative legal history of servitude in other jurisdictions will find no direct doctrinal parallel; the phrase belongs to the specific procedural vocabulary of the English common law courts under Edward II.