Definition
The act of lending money at usury — that is, at an excessive or unlawful rate of interest. The term captures not merely the charging of usurious interest but the entire practice of making a loan on usurious terms.
Why It Matters in Research
Defeneration is a rare and largely obsolete term that appears almost exclusively in older legal dictionaries and French and Canadian civil law sources. Researchers encountering the word in historical documents — particularly 19th-century Quebec or Louisiana materials — should recognize it as a technical synonym for usurious lending rather than a distinct legal cause of action or offense. Its practical significance in primary sources is narrow: the word flags a usury transaction, and the researcher's work then lies in tracing the applicable usury law of the jurisdiction and period.
Because the term is essentially dormant in modern legal writing, keyword searches in digitized databases will return sparse results. Where it does appear, context almost always confirms the usury meaning, but researchers should not confuse it with DEFAMATION (a common misreading in cursory searches) or with related but distinct concepts such as CHAMPERTY or BARRATRY, which also carry connotations of improper dealing but involve entirely different conduct.
The Black's Law Dictionary first edition entry notes French and Canadian law specifically, citing 3 Low. Can. 421, placing the term firmly within the civilian tradition. Researchers working in common law jurisdictions are unlikely to find the term in primary sources at all.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree exactly on the core definition: the act of lending money on usury. There is no meaningful divergence among Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Bouvier's, and Rapalje & Lawrence. The consistency is itself informative — the term was stable in meaning across the 19th century, never acquiring subsidiary senses or contested interpretations.
Bouvier's attributes the definition to Wharton, pointing to Francis Wharton's law lexicon as the likely transmission path into American legal dictionaries. Black's first edition adds the explicit French and Canadian law context, a jurisdictional note absent from the other sources. The second edition of Black's drops that jurisdictional qualifier, suggesting the editors either considered it self-evident or were condensing the entry for a broader audience.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the procedural consequences of defeneration, the remedies available to a borrower, or how the concept interacted with ecclesiastical prohibitions on usury. Researchers needing that context must turn to treatises on usury law directly rather than relying on dictionary entries for this term.
Jurisdictional Note
The term carries a civilian law flavor and appears most naturally in French Canadian legal materials. In common law jurisdictions, the same conduct would be addressed under usury statutes without use of this term. Modern researchers should not expect to find defeneration in current American, English, or Canadian statutory or case law.