Definition
An archaic legal term drawn from medieval English law denoting idle persons, vagabonds, and those who lived without lawful occupation or visible means of support. Faitours were a recognized category of social and legal problem in pre-modern English law, subject to punishment, expulsion, and various statutory controls aimed at compelling labor or removing undesirables from communities. The term appears primarily in early English statutes and legal texts concerned with vagrancy and the suppression of idleness.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of faitour — no substantive modern common definition exists. The word has effectively passed out of ordinary English usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not present as a standalone entry; the word had largely retreated into legal and antiquarian contexts by the nineteenth century.
The term has no meaningful gap between common and legal meaning to navigate — it is, functionally, pure historical legal jargon. It is included here because researchers encountering it in early English statutes or legal glossaries may not recognize it at all.
Common Confusion
Rapalje & Lawrence defines faitours as "evil-doers; idle livers," introducing a moral and criminal coloring that the other dictionaries do not emphasize. Black's and Bouvier's treat the term more neutrally as simply "idle persons" or "vagabonds." The distinction matters: a researcher using Rapalje & Lawrence as a guide may read a stronger accusatory meaning into historical documents than the source texts necessarily support. The dominant tradition in English legal lexicography aligns with Bouvier's framing — social and economic disorder, not necessarily criminal wrongdoing in the modern sense.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter faitours in one of three contexts: transcriptions or translations of medieval English statutes (particularly those touching vagrancy, labor regulation, or poor relief); early modern legal glossaries and abridgments citing Cowell, Blount, or Termes de la Ley; or secondary scholarship on the history of vagrancy law.
The term belongs to a cluster of archaic vagrancy vocabulary — alongside rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars, and idle wanderers — that early English law deployed somewhat interchangeably but that carried distinct technical resonances in specific statutory contexts. When indexing or searching Law Mind corpus sources for material on vagrancy law, faitours may appear where a modern researcher would expect "vagrant" or "idle poor." Failure to recognize the term can cause relevant primary sources to be missed entirely.
The historical legal dictionaries all trace the term to the same small set of secondary authorities: Cowell's Interpreter, Blount's Law Dictionary, and Termes de la Ley. This convergence signals that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, faitours was already an antiquarian term being recovered from earlier sources rather than a word in active legal circulation. Researchers should treat it as a marker of early English law rather than as a term likely to appear in post-seventeenth-century legal proceedings or documents.
No significant jurisdictional variation applies — the term is essentially confined to English legal history and does not appear to have traveled into American legal usage with any independent meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition: idle persons, idle livers, vagabonds. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's are nearly verbatim, all citing Cowell and Blount as their authorities, with Bouvier adding Termes de la Ley and Cunningham's Law Dictionary to the chain of sources. This uniformity reflects a straightforward transmission of the term through English legal lexicography rather than any independent analysis.
The sole outlier is Rapalje & Lawrence, which leads with "evil-doers" before adding "idle livers." This divergence may reflect a different source tradition or a broader reading of the Old French and Middle English roots of the word, but Rapalje & Lawrence does not explain its reasoning. Given that no other dictionary in the Law Mind corpus supports the "evil-doers" rendering as the primary meaning, researchers should treat the Bouvier/Black's formulation — idle persons and vagabonds — as the authoritative reading for most purposes.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: none provides statutory context, dating, or guidance on which specific English enactments used the term. Researchers needing that granularity will need to move beyond the dictionary shelf to primary sources and legal histories of English vagrancy law.