Definition
In old English law, to fold — specifically, the act of penning or enclosing livestock, particularly sheep, within a fold. The term appears in medieval legal and administrative contexts as a verb of Latin origin used in records governing manorial agricultural obligations. The passive form faldari means "to be folded," indicating the subject livestock were required to be enclosed in a designated fold.
The related term FALDATA, derived from falda (fold), denotes a flock or fold of sheep as a unit — the collection of animals subject to folding obligations.
Common Confusion
FALDARE, FALDATA, and FALDA are closely related but distinct: faldare is the verb (the act of folding), faldata is the collective noun (the flock or fold itself), and falda is the noun for the fold as a physical structure or enclosure. Researchers encountering any of these terms in manorial records should check which form is used, as the distinction matters for understanding whether the record describes a duty, a quantity of animals, or a physical facility.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in medieval English manorial records, custumals, and treatises on manorial law — particularly in contexts describing the fold-course system and the lord's rights over tenants' livestock. The folding of sheep on arable land was an economically significant manorial obligation: dung from penned sheep fertilized the lord's fields, and the right to compel tenants' flocks to be folded on demesne land (sometimes called the foldage right) was a valuable incident of lordship.
Researchers working with Fleta or similar medieval legal compilations should note that faldare and its cognates appear as technical terms embedded in Latin-language descriptions of villein services and agricultural duties. These terms are unlikely to appear in post-medieval legal sources; their presence in a document is itself a dating and context signal pointing to the feudal manorial period.
Corpus researchers should also be alert to variant spellings and Latinized forms across manuscript sources. The connection between faldare and broader concepts of manorial tenure, villein services, and agricultural incidents means this term sits at the intersection of agrarian history and legal history — readers approaching from a purely doctrinal background may need supplementary manorial history sources to fully interpret passages where it appears.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary historical legal dictionary treatment, drawing on Fleta (lib. 2, c. 73, § 5) for faldare and faldari, and on Cowell for faldata. Fleta, a late thirteenth-century English legal treatise, is one of the few sources to use faldare in a technical legal context, and Burrill's entry is essentially a gloss on Fleta's usage. Cowell's Interpreter, a seventeenth-century legal dictionary, supplies the faldata definition, confirming the term's survival in legal reference literature well after the practical obsolescence of folding obligations.
No substantial divergence exists among historical sources on this term because the record is thin: this is specialized medieval agricultural-legal vocabulary that historical lexicographers preserved but did not elaborate. The historical dictionaries agree on meaning but offer little on the practical operation of foldage rights or the legal consequences of breach. Researchers seeking substantive discussion of the fold-course system and its legal incidents will need to go beyond dictionary sources to manorial law treatises and agrarian history scholarship.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English manorial law and has no recognized equivalent in Scots, Irish, or continental legal systems. Its relevance is confined to research involving English medieval manorial tenure.