Definition
Fastermannes (also rendered as fastermen or fastermannes) is an archaic term from Saxon law denoting bondsmen or sureties who were mutually bound to guarantee one another's peaceable conduct. Under the Anglo-Saxon system of collective security, these men were "fast bound" — pledged together as guarantors of the peace, each answerable for the others within their group. The term reflects the early medieval English practice of organizing communities into mutually accountable units for purposes of law enforcement and social order.
Common Confusion
Fastermannes is closely related to, but distinct from, the broader Saxon institution of frank-pledge (frithborh or frankpledge), under which groups of men were collectively responsible for producing any member accused of wrongdoing. Fastermannes emphasizes the surety relationship among the bondsmen themselves — the mutual binding — rather than the administrative unit or the obligation to produce an accused person. Researchers should avoid treating the terms as interchangeable; they describe overlapping but not identical aspects of Saxon communal accountability.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources concerned with Anglo-Saxon and early Norman legal history. Researchers will encounter it in discussions of frankpledge, tithing groups, and the pre-Conquest mechanisms for maintaining the peace — contexts where communal surety substituted for what later became formal bail and recognizance doctrine.
The principal research trap is terminological fragmentation: the Saxon system of collective suretyship is described under several overlapping labels (frankpledge, borh, mainprise, fastermannes) depending on the source's focus and period. A researcher working backward from modern bail or surety doctrine into medieval antecedents must track all of these threads simultaneously, as no single term covers the whole institution.
Because fastermannes appears in only a narrow band of the historical legal corpus, searches limited to this spelling will return sparse results. Variant spellings and Latinized forms in medieval records require flexible search strategies. Spelman's Glossarium (referenced in Bouvier) and similar Anglo-Latin glossaries are the core finding tools for this vocabulary.
The term has no modern legal application. Its research value is entirely historical: illuminating the deep roots of surety, bail, and community-accountability doctrines that evolved substantially through the Norman period and beyond.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines fastermannes as "bondsmen" and "men fast bound as sureties of the peace for each other under the Saxon law," citing Spelman's Glossarium and the Encyclopaedia Londinensis. This is the primary anglophone legal dictionary treatment of the term, and Bouvier essentially transmits rather than elaborates on the earlier glossarial sources.
The entry is notable for what it leaves unaddressed: Bouvier does not explain the structural mechanics of the mutual bond, the size or composition of the group, or how liability was enforced. Researchers needing operational detail must go beyond Bouvier to Spelman directly and to historical scholarship on Anglo-Saxon law. The term receives no treatment in later standard legal dictionaries such as Black's, reflecting its status as antiquarian vocabulary rather than living legal terminology by the nineteenth century.
The citation to Spelman is significant. Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum is a foundational source for Anglo-Saxon legal terminology, and his treatment of fastermannes in the context of Saxon peace-suretyship is one of the few authoritative early modern discussions of the concept.
Jurisdictional Note
Fastermannes is a term of purely English legal history, rooted in Anglo-Saxon law prior to the Norman Conquest. It has no counterpart in civil law systems and no relevance to American, Scottish, or continental legal traditions except as a historical antecedent to general surety and bail concepts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Suretyship — for the doctrinal lineage from communal Saxon surety to modern surety and bail law.
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Frankpledge — for the institutional context in which fastermannes operated.