Definition
To break the peace; to commit open violence. A term of medieval English law denoting the act of disturbing the public peace through open, forcible conduct. The word appears in early legal texts in connection with offenses against the king's peace — the foundational legal concept underlying much of the common law's treatment of violent and disorderly acts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering EXFREDIARE will almost certainly be working with medieval English legal sources or early modern legal dictionaries that preserved the term as an artifact of Latin-inflected Anglo-Saxon legal vocabulary. It has no practical role in modern legal proceedings or doctrine. Its significance is historical and taxonomic: the term marks the boundary between the Saxon concept of frith (peace, protected order) and the Latin legal language imposed over it as common law was systematized.
The word appears in Leges Henrici Primi (Laws of Henry I), a source Burrill specifically cites (c. 31), which places its operative context firmly in the late eleventh to early twelfth century. Researchers using Burrill will find his etymological note valuable — the construction from Latin ex (privative) and Saxon frede or frith (peace) is one of the clearer examples in legal Latin of a hybrid word encoding two legal traditions simultaneously. That etymology is substantively meaningful, not merely decorative, because it signals that the term is defined by its negation: to exfrediare is literally to un-peace, to undo the condition of protected order.
For corpus researchers, this term is a trapdoor: it appears in historical dictionaries as a standalone entry but is typically followed immediately by EXHÆREDATIO and related terms in the same alphabetical block. Do not conflate entries. Researchers pulling surrounding text from digitized sources should verify which entry they are actually reading.
The term has no significant jurisdictional variation in the modern sense because it has not survived as active legal vocabulary. It belongs to a cluster of obsolete Latin-English law terms that serve primarily as research anchors into primary sources of the Anglo-Norman legal period.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition — to break the peace; to commit open violence — with only minor variation in phrasing. This is one of the more stable entries across the historical shelf.
Burrill's entry is the most substantively useful. It alone provides the etymological analysis (ex + Saxon frede/frith), cites Cowell's Interpreter as a secondary authority, and points directly to Leges Henrici Primi c. 31 as the primary source. Burrill's additional note tracing frith through Saxon law gives researchers a route into the broader literature on the king's peace as a legal institution.
Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence each cite Jacob — a reference to Giles Jacob's Law Dictionary (various editions, early eighteenth century) — as their authority, without independent analysis. This suggests that for these compilers, the term was already antiquarian by the time of their writing. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is the briefest, adding nothing beyond Jacob's formulation.
None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on how exfrediare related to specific common law offenses — breach of peace, affray, or riot — or how it mapped onto the developing common law of the king's peace. Researchers seeking that analytical connection will need to look beyond the dictionary shelf to primary legal-historical scholarship on the Leges Henrici Primi and the Norman consolidation of English law.