Definition
To scald. In the context of English legal history, escaldare refers to the act of scalding hogs, which was allegedly performed as a tenure obligation under the ancient feudal system of serjeanty. Under serjeanty tenure, a tenant held land from the Crown or a lord in exchange for rendering a specified personal service. Escaldare represents one of the more unusual recorded examples of such a service — the scalding (cleaning or preparing by immersion in hot water) of hogs as a defined feudal duty tied to land tenure.
The term survives in the legal record almost exclusively as a curiosity of serjeanty tenure, cited by Wharton and reproduced in the standard nineteenth-century dictionaries. It has no operative modern meaning in any living legal system.
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Why It Matters in Research
Escaldare is a term researchers will encounter only in two narrow contexts: (1) historical surveys of serjeanty tenure, particularly those cataloguing the full range of personal services by which land was held in medieval England; and (2) dictionary entries reproducing the Wharton gloss verbatim.
The primary research trap is the Rapalje & Lawrence entry, which contains a typographical or editorial corruption — the definition bleeds directly into an unrelated string of case citations and dictionary entries (ERROR AND DELAY, ERROR BOOK, ERROR CORAM NOBIS) with no clean break. Researchers consulting that source should treat the escaldare entry as ending after "serjeanty" and disregard the appended case material, which belongs to separate headwords.
Because the term derives from serjeanty tenure, researchers working on feudal land law, the history of tenure abolition, or the Tenures Abolition Act 1660 (which eliminated most forms of serjeanty) may encounter escaldare in primary or secondary sources covering that period. It is also relevant to antiquarian legal writing where obscure serjeanty examples were collected to illustrate the range of personal service obligations.
No American legal application exists. The term does not appear in case law as an operative legal concept.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the substance: escaldare means "to scald," and the term's legal significance is confined to its alleged use as a serjeanty tenure service involving the scalding of hogs. All three ultimately trace to Wharton as the authority for the proposition.
The entries are brief and non-analytical, which reflects the nature of the term — it is a lexical fossil preserved for completeness rather than a term with active doctrinal content. None of the dictionaries elaborate on which specific tenure arrangement involved this service, which lord or manor it was associated with, or whether the obligation was ever the subject of litigation. The reference to Wharton (Law Lexicon) is the sole cited authority across all three entries, suggesting the dictionaries are reproducing a common source rather than independently verified history.
What the historical dictionaries miss: no entry discusses the broader framework of serjeanty tenure into which escaldare fits, nor do they note the practical significance of the Tenures Abolition Act 1660, which rendered such obligations obsolete. A researcher relying solely on these dictionary entries would have no context for where this term sits in the history of English land law.
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Jurisdictional Note
Escaldare has no jurisdictional significance in American law. As a term of English feudal tenure, it belongs entirely to the pre-modern English legal system. No American jurisdiction adopted serjeanty tenure in any operative sense.
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