Definition
An old English legal term for a fold-course: the right to pasture sheep over another's land, or the designated route and range over which a flock moves in the course of grazing. The term encompasses both the physical sheep walk — the tract of land used as sheep pasture or range — and the legal interest in that use. It belongs to the family of servitudes and customary rights governing agricultural land use in medieval and early modern England.
Why It Matters in Research
Falde cursus appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources and is unlikely to surface in any modern legal context. Researchers will encounter it primarily when working with manorial records, common-field disputes, or old English real property litigation. The term is taxonomically adjacent to common of pasture, common of shack, and fold-course rights — each of which had distinct legal characters in English agrarian law and should not be conflated.
The phrase is a reliable marker of period and jurisdiction: its presence in a document almost certainly signals English law before the nineteenth century, and more probably before the enclosure movement substantially transformed these customary arrangements. Researchers tracing the history of easements or profits à prendre should note that fold-course rights occupied a hybrid position — sometimes treated as a customary right appurtenant to the manor, sometimes as a distinct profit — and that classification affected both enforceability and remedy.
Black's citation to 2 Ventris 139 anchors the term in late seventeenth-century common law litigation, suggesting the concept was still in active legal use as late as that period even if it was already archaic in everyday speech.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Bouvier's entries are in close agreement: both define falde cursus as a fold-course or sheep walk, both cite Spelman's Glossary as the primary lexicographic authority, and both reference 2 Ventris 139 as the supporting case authority. The entries are brief and largely parallel, which is typical of the historical dictionaries' treatment of obsolete manorial terms — they preserve the reference without developing the legal doctrine.
Neither source elaborates on the nature of the interest or its relationship to other common-law grazing rights, leaving researchers to consult the underlying manorial and agrarian law literature for substantive guidance. Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum remains the deepest available source for this term's technical content. The brevity of both entries should not be read as evidence that the right was unimportant; fold-course rights generated substantial litigation in English courts, particularly in Norfolk and Suffolk, where sheep-and-corn husbandry made such rights economically significant.
Jurisdictional Note
Falde cursus is a term of English law only. It has no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or continental legal traditions. It is inapplicable outside historical English manorial and common-field contexts.