Definition
An archaic Law French term carrying two distinct meanings found in early legal records and glossaries:
1. False. Used in compound legal phrases derived from Law French to signify falsity, fraud, or forgery — as in terms related to false pleading or false measures.
2. A burden or load. Used in the context of weights, measures, or obligations imposed on land or persons, particularly in feudal and manorial records.
Both senses are obsolete and appear almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources, medieval court rolls, and glossaries of Law French terminology.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An eye dialect spelling of "fecks," an exclamation (chiefly Irish English), itself a euphemism for an oath. No legal content.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded.
The gap here is absolute rather than merely meaningful. The common English word and the legal term are unrelated in origin, meaning, and use. A researcher encountering "faix" in a legal manuscript should disregard the colloquial English form entirely.
Common Confusion
The two legal meanings of faix are internally distinct and should not be collapsed. "Faix" in the sense of false connects to the broader Law French vocabulary around fraud and falsity (faux, faus, faux serment). "Faix" in the sense of burden or load belongs to a different register entirely — one closer to feudal service obligations and measurement customs. Misreading one sense for the other in a historical document will produce significant interpretive error.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will surface almost exclusively in transcriptions of medieval English court records, manorial rolls, or in secondary glossaries drawing on those sources. Burrill credits Kelham's dictionary as the authority, placing the term firmly in the Law French stratum of English legal vocabulary — the language of pleading and court usage in England roughly from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century.
Two practical traps exist for researchers:
First, the "false" sense of faix may appear in fragments of plea rolls or indictments where the Law French formula survives in abbreviated or corrupted form. Without familiarity with Law French conventions, a transcriber might miss the legal significance of the term or misread it as a scribal error.
Second, the "burden or load" sense is relevant to research on feudal tenure, tolls, and market customs — areas where specialized vocabulary for units of weight and obligation was highly localized. The meaning could vary by commodity and region, so context in the surrounding document is essential to interpretation.
Neither meaning survives into modern legal usage. A researcher encountering "faix" in any source after roughly the eighteenth century is almost certainly looking at a transcription artifact, a historical quotation, or (in non-legal text) the Irish English exclamation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole dictionary authority here, and its entry is brief: Burrill gives both senses — "false" and "a burden, or load" — with attribution to Kelham's glossary of Law French. Thomas Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779) is the underlying source, which itself drew on early plea rolls and legal manuscripts. Burrill does not elaborate on usage examples or distinguish the contexts in which each meaning would appear.
No other major historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Bouvier, not Black's — carries an entry for faix. This gap is itself informative: by the time those dictionaries were compiled, the term had passed out of practical use and was of antiquarian interest only. Burrill's comparative breadth in covering Law French vocabulary makes his dictionary the appropriate starting point for any research into this stratum of legal language, but researchers should go directly to Kelham and to the primary sources Kelham compiled from for anything beyond a surface definition.
Jurisdictional Note
Relevant only to English legal history. No reception into American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions has been identified.