Definition
A fee or rent paid by a customary tenant to his lord for the privilege of folding the tenant's own sheep on the tenant's own land. The payment secured a liberty that would otherwise belong to the lord — namely, the right to determine where sheep could be folded and, consequently, where manure would be deposited to fertilize the soil. Faldfey thus represents one of many granular obligations characteristic of the feudal manorial system, where even a tenant's use of his own land for ordinary agricultural purposes could be subject to lordly control and a corresponding payment.
Common Confusion
Faldfey is sometimes loosely grouped with other fold-related manorial obligations, particularly faldage (also written foldage), but these are distinct concepts. Faldage typically refers to the lord's right to fold the tenants' sheep on the lord's own land — capturing the manure for the lord's benefit — while faldfey is the fee paid by the tenant to be exempted from that obligation and to fold sheep on his own ground instead. The two terms operate in opposite directions: faldage is the lord's affirmative right; faldfey is the tenant's payment to exercise his own.
Why It Matters in Research
Faldfey appears almost exclusively in historical English manorial records and in legal dictionaries compiled before the twentieth century. Researchers encountering this term will find it in documents relating to copyhold tenure, customary tenancy, and manorial court records — not in any modern statutory or common law context, as the feudal obligations underlying it were largely extinguished in England by a series of nineteenth-century reforms culminating in the Law of Property Act 1922 and the Law of Property Act 1925, which abolished copyhold tenure. American law never received this specific manorial incident, so faldfey has no operative significance in U.S. jurisdictions.
The principal research trap is orthographic variation. Historical sources render the term inconsistently — faldfey, faldfeoh, fald-feh, and similar spellings appear across different periods and hands. Burrill traces the Saxon components (fald, meaning fold, and feh, meaning fee), which helps when parsing variant spellings in primary sources. Researchers working with manorial surveys, court baron records, or customary rolls should be alert to these variants before concluding the concept is absent from a document.
The connection to soil fertility and agricultural productivity is worth noting for researchers examining agrarian history alongside legal history: control over where sheep were folded was economically significant because manure deposits determined which fields were most productively fertilized. Faldfey sits at the intersection of property law and agricultural economics in a way that purely legal analysis can obscure.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries present a consistent core definition with minor variation in framing. Black's (both editions) and Burrill follow Blount directly, defining faldfey as a fee paid by a tenant to the lord for leave to fold sheep on the tenant's own ground. Bouvier's shifts the framing slightly — describing it as compensation paid by customary tenants for liberty to fold their own sheep on their own land — and cites Cunningham's Law Dictionary and Cowell rather than Blount. The substance is identical across all four sources.
Burrill adds the most analytical value by breaking down the Saxon etymology and cross-referencing the entry for Falda, which aids in situating the term within the broader cluster of fold-related manorial concepts. Neither Black's edition flags the distinction between faldfey and faldage explicitly, leaving researchers to infer it from context.
What the historical dictionaries uniformly omit is any discussion of how frequently or in what regional contexts faldfey actually appeared in practice, or how courts treated disputes over the obligation. The definitions are definitional rather than doctrinal — serviceable for identifying the term but insufficient for understanding its practical operation in manorial administration.
Jurisdictional Note
Faldfey is an English manorial incident with no American reception. It is relevant only to research involving English feudal and copyhold tenure prior to the abolition of copyhold in the twentieth century. Researchers working in Scottish, Welsh, or Irish legal history should be cautious about assuming identical terminology or practice, as manorial customs varied considerably across the British Isles.