Definition
A feudal privilege, historically exercised by lords of the manor, to establish and move portable sheep folds across fields within the manor — including the fields of tenants — for the purpose of fertilizing the land through the animals' droppings. The sheep were folded on the ground, remained overnight, and were moved periodically to distribute manure across the soil.
The term also carries a secondary, related meaning: a fee or payment made by a tenant to be exempted from the lord's exercise of this privilege over the tenant's land.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "A privilege of setting up, and moving about, folds for sheep, in any fields within manors, in order to manure them; often reserved to himself by the lord of the manor. / A fee paid for exemption from this."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A privilege of setting up, and moving about, folds for sheep, in any fields within manors, in order to manure them; — often reserved to himself by the lord of the manor."
The common and legal definitions are unusually close here because this term never passed into general popular usage — it remained tied to its agrarian feudal context throughout its documented life. Webster's 1913 omits the exemption-fee sense that Wiktionary captures, a distinction that matters in manorial record research where payments and privileges appear in the same documents under the same heading.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Faldage appears in historical records under several interchangeable or related terms, all describing the same or closely connected right:
- SECTA FALDARE: Latin form used in formal legal instruments and manor court rolls.
- FOLD-COURSE: The practical exercise of the foldage right; also used to describe the route or area over which the right was exercised.
- FREE-FOLD: A variant emphasizing the lord's unrestricted exercise of the privilege across tenant lands.
- FALDAGII: Latinized plural or nominal form appearing in ecclesiastical and manorial records.
- FALDAGE FEE: The monetary payment made by a tenant in lieu of submitting to the lord's exercise of the right over the tenant's land.
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Why It Matters in Research
Faldage is an extinct legal right with no modern operative significance, but it is a live research term for anyone working with English manorial records, feudal tenure disputes, enclosure history, or agrarian legal history through roughly the seventeenth century.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the dual meaning — privilege and exemption fee — creates ambiguity in primary sources. A manorial account recording a faldage payment may be recording income from the lord's exercise of the right or income from tenants buying out of it. Context and record type determine which reading applies.
Second, the variant Latin forms (secta faldare, faldagium, faldagii) are frequently encountered in manor court rolls and estate surveys without cross-reference to the English term. Researchers who encounter these Latin forms without knowing the English equivalent may fail to connect related materials across a corpus.
Third, faldage intersects with enclosure history. As open-field agriculture gave way to enclosure, foldage rights were frequently contested, extinguished by agreement, or commuted to fixed payments. Records of these transitions appear in Chancery, common law pleadings, and local estate papers — often without using the word faldage explicitly.
Fourth, Black's 1st edition entry as reproduced contains a textual corruption at the opening, running together the faldage definition with a fragment from a Scottish law entry on oath-taking ("a solemn pledge an oath"). Researchers relying on digitized versions of Black's 1st edition should verify the faldage entry against the physical text or the 2nd edition, which gives a clean version.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition: a manorial lord's right to fold sheep on fields within the manor, including tenant fields, for fertilization purposes. Bouvier and both Black's editions identify the same cluster of variant names. Burrill adds useful etymological grounding, tracing faldage to the Latin faldagium and the root falda (fold), and specifically characterizes the fold as a moveable pen — a practical detail that clarifies the nature of the right as ambulatory, not fixed.
Burrill's entry is the most analytically precise of the four, distinguishing the act of setting up the fold from the movement of the fold across the field as a continuous operation. This distinction matters for understanding the scope of the right as it was litigated: disputes often turned on how far the lord's right to move the fold extended and whether particular fields fell within or outside its reach.
None of the historical dictionaries address the exemption-fee dimension of faldage with any depth, though Wiktionary's entry captures it. This gap is significant because manorial account rolls routinely record payments made in lieu of foldage service, and researchers who know only the privilege definition may misread those entries.
Spelman's Glossarium is cited across multiple entries as the foundational source on this term; Cowell's legal dictionary (Interpreter) is cited in Black's 2nd edition alongside Spelman. Both are pre-1700 works and reflect the term's active legal life in the period when manorial tenure still had practical force.
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Jurisdictional Note
Faldage was an English manorial institution. It has no direct counterpart in Scots law, American law, or civil law systems. Research into analogous fertilization or grazing rights in other jurisdictions requires different terminology entirely. In English law, faldage rights were progressively eroded through enclosure legislation and effectively extinguished as a practical matter well before the formal abolition of copyhold tenure in 1922.
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