Definition
An archaic term from old English law referring to the tackle and furniture of a cart or wain — that is, the harness, fittings, and equipment used to outfit a horse-drawn vehicle for work or transport.
Why It Matters in Research
FALERZ is a relic term with no surviving practical use in modern legal practice or litigation. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in medieval English property disputes, estate inventories, distress actions, or records involving the seizure of goods, where the enumeration of chattels was highly specific. Because agricultural equipment and draft animal gear constituted real economic value in the medieval and early modern English economy, such terms appear in inventories, probate records, and pleadings where specific goods had to be named with precision to establish ownership or support a claim. Researchers working in historical English common law sources — particularly records predating the seventeenth century — should be alert to this and similar specialized vocabulary for movable agricultural property. The term does not appear in later editions of Black's Law Dictionary and has left no trace in American jurisprudence, making Black's 2nd edition and Blount's Glossographia (the glossary of archaic and technical terms cited as the underlying authority) the primary reference points.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the sole legal dictionary entry for this term, defining it as "the tackle and furniture of a cart or wain" and attributing the definition to Blount — a reference to Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary (1670), one of the earliest specialized English legal dictionaries and a standard authority for obsolete common law terminology. No other major legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — including later editions of Black's — preserves this entry. The reliance on Blount signals that even by the time Black's 2nd edition was compiled, FALERZ was already a purely antiquarian entry, included for completeness rather than practical utility. Researchers should treat Blount's Nomo-Lexicon as the original source and Black's as a secondary transmission. No common law treatise in standard use elaborates on the term.