Definition
In old English law, a faldecursus was a fold course: the right or practice of moving a flock of sheep across or over a designated tract of land, together with the associated grazing or feeding privileges incident to that movement. The term encompasses two closely related concepts: (1) the physical course or circuit followed by a fold (a portable sheep enclosure) as it was moved across land, and (2) the right to pasture or feed sheep along a particular walk or run. In practice, the two meanings were inseparable — the fold course defined both the route and the grazing entitlement attached to it.
Why It Matters in Research
Faldecursus is an archaic term of the old English agrarian law and appears almost exclusively in sources predating the nineteenth century. Researchers will encounter it in manorial records, early real property disputes, and treatises on common field agriculture. The term is substantively connected to faldagium — the lord's right to fold tenants' sheep on his demesne land to fertilize the soil — and understanding faldecursus requires familiarity with that right and the broader system of common field tenure in medieval and early modern England.
The primary research trap is conflating faldecursus with the general law of common of pasture. A fold course was a more specific and often exclusive right, frequently attached to a manorial lord's demesne and capable of being asserted against tenants and commoners who might otherwise enjoy grazing rights over the same land. Disputes over fold courses generated real litigation in the English courts, which is how the term finds its way into reports such as 2 Ventris 139 — a seventeenth-century law report cited by Burrill. That citation is the principal documentary anchor for the "sheep walk or feed for sheep" gloss and should be consulted directly if the nuance of the right in a particular context matters.
Because faldecursus belongs to a cluster of Anglo-Norman and Law Latin terms describing manorial agricultural rights — faldagium, common of pasture, turbary, piscary, estovers — corpus researchers should expect these terms to appear together in the same documents. Searching for faldecursus in isolation will underrepresent the full documentary record; searching alongside faldagium and related common-right terms will surface the relevant manorial and chancery materials more completely.
The term is extinct in modern legal practice. Any appearance in a contemporary document is either antiquarian, in a historical deed being interpreted, or a recitation from older sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this term in the Law Mind corpus. His entry is brief but precise: he identifies the term as Latin, locates it in old English law, glosses it as "fold course" and "sheep walk, or feed for sheep," cites Spelman's Glossarium for the etymological and definitional anchor, and points to 2 Ventris 139 for the sheep-walk sense. The Spelman citation is significant — Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum is a foundational source for Law Latin terms in English manorial law, and Burrill's reliance on it signals that this term was already archaic even at the time of early modern English legal scholarship.
No substantial divergence exists among historical dictionaries on this term, which is itself informative: faldecursus was narrow and technical enough that it did not attract competing definitions or evolve into broader usage. Historical sources do not address what remedies attached to interference with a fold course, how the right was created or transferred, or how it interacted with enclosure proceedings — gaps a researcher must fill from primary manorial records, treatises on real property, and the law reports directly.
Jurisdictional Note
Faldecursus is a term of English manorial law with no recognized American legal counterpart. It is irrelevant to U.S. jurisdictions except in the rare instance of interpreting a colonial-era grant or deed that expressly carries forward English manorial terminology.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Faldagium
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Field System
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Manorial Rights