Definition
An archaic Anglo-Saxon term with two related but distinct senses found in early English legal texts:
1. (Law French) "To make" — used in formulaic legal expression, now entirely obsolete in practice.
2. (Anglo-Saxon) Food, provisions, or an entertainment feast; more specifically, rent paid in the form of provisions rather than money. By extension, the term was applied to the manor or estate from which such provision-rent was rendered.
FEOR in its second sense is the Saxon root of the later Latin form firma and the modern English words ferm and farm. Its significance in legal history lies in tracing how economic arrangements in early medieval England — the rendering of sustenance as a form of obligation — gave rise to the entire vocabulary of agrarian tenancy in English law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not a current English word. No standard entry.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term had fallen entirely out of common use long before the nineteenth century.
Editorial note: FEOR has no modern common counterpart. It is pure historical legal vocabulary, traceable only through Anglo-Saxon sources and the early legal antiquarians who preserved them. A reader encountering it in translated or transcribed medieval documents should not attempt to interpret it through any modern English cognate.
Common Confusion
FEOR, FEORME, FERME, and FARM are frequently conflated because they represent successive stages of the same linguistic and legal evolution. FEOR and FEORME are the Anglo-Saxon forms. FIRMA is the Latinized version adopted by ecclesiastical and royal record-keepers. FERME and FERM are the Law French adaptations. FARM is the modern English descendant. Each form corresponds to a slightly different documentary period and legal context. Researchers who encounter one form in a source and search for another may miss directly relevant material.
Why It Matters in Research
FEOR is primarily of significance to researchers working in Anglo-Saxon legal history, the history of feudal tenure, or the etymology of agrarian legal terminology. It is unlikely to appear in any post-Conquest legal instrument in this precise form; by the time of the Norman legal reorganization, the term had been superseded by firma in Latin records and ferme in Law French records.
The chief research trap is assuming a clean break between these forms. Anglo-Saxon land charters, hagiographic texts, and Gospel translations (Burrill cites the Saxon Evangelist, Marc. vi. 21, in which Herod's feast is described using feorme) all use variants of this root. A researcher tracing the legal concept of farm or rent-in-kind back through the historical record will encounter each of these forms in turn and must recognize them as connected.
Cross-corpus alert: Entries for FIRMA, FERME, FERM, and FARM in the Law Mind corpus are direct continuations of this entry and should be consulted together when tracing the development of agrarian tenancy vocabulary.
Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum is the foundational secondary source for this family of terms. Cowell's Interpreter and Blackstone's Commentaries (Book II, p. 318) provide the bridge between the antiquarian sources and the common law tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal source preserving FEOR in the legal dictionary tradition. Burrill draws directly on Spelman and Kelham for the dual definitions (Law French "to make" and Saxon "food/provisions/rent"), and cites Cowell and Blackstone for the connection to firma and farm.
No other major historical legal dictionary — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Jacob's — appears to carry an independent entry for FEOR in this form. This means Burrill's entry, while brief, is effectively the terminus of the legal dictionary tradition for this term. Researchers should not expect corroboration across the standard shelf sources; the fuller treatment exists in Spelman's Glossarium, which is a legal antiquarian reference rather than a law dictionary proper.
Blackstone's treatment at 2 Bl. Com. 318 is worth consulting for the chain of development from Saxon food-rent to the common law concept of farm.
Jurisdictional Note
Entirely English in origin and application. Irrelevant to civil law jurisdictions and to American law except as historical background for understanding the English agrarian tenure concepts that partly influenced early colonial land arrangements.