Definition
An old English legal term denoting a flock or fold of sheep. The word appears in medieval English legal records as a descriptor of livestock held collectively, typically in the context of manorial rights, agricultural tenure, or the incidents of feudal landholding that involved the keeping and folding of sheep on demesne or tenant land.
Why It Matters in Research
FALDATA is an archaic term of narrow application, encountered almost exclusively in transcriptions of medieval English manorial records, surveys, custumals, and early common law texts. Researchers working with documents from the Anglo-Norman or early common law period — particularly those touching on foldage rights, sheep tithes, or manorial agricultural obligations — may encounter the term without ready explanation in modern indices.
The word carries no continuing doctrinal life in modern law. It does not appear in statutory codifications or modern case law, and its relevance is confined to historical legal research involving agrarian tenure and the incidents of the manor. Researchers should be aware that related concepts — the right of foldage, the obligation to fold sheep on the lord's land to fertilize it, and the various dues owed in connection with livestock — developed their own distinct terminology in parallel, and FALDATA may appear alongside or interchangeably with terms such as faldage or faldagesoca depending on the source and date of the document.
The consistency of the definition across all three source dictionaries here is notable: each entry is nearly identical and each cites Cowell's Interpreter (1607) as its authority, suggesting that all three are drawing from the same original source rather than from independent confirmation. Researchers should treat this convergence as indicative of limited primary source diversity, not as triangulated verification.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary, its second edition, and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: FALDATA means a flock or fold of sheep in old English law. All three attribute the definition to Cowell — a reference to John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), an early English legal glossary that served as a primary reference for archaic and Anglo-Latin legal terms for centuries. This tight sourcing lineage means that later dictionaries are essentially reprinting Cowell's gloss rather than independently documenting usage.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any contextual explanation of how the term functioned within the legal relationships it implicated — whether in connection with manorial customs, livestock taxation, or the foldsoke (the obligation of tenants to fold their sheep on the lord's land). Researchers requiring that context will need to look beyond these dictionary entries to primary sources in manorial law and agrarian history.
Jurisdictional Note
Applicable only in the historical context of English manorial and common law. The term has no recognized usage in Scottish, Irish, American, or other legal traditions, and no modern common law jurisdiction employs it.