Definition
In historical legal usage, a ferreur (also spelled ferreour or ferrour) is a horse-shoer or farrier — a craftsman who shoes horses and may also provide general veterinary care for them. The term appears in early English legal records, particularly Year Books, in the context of contracts or covenants for the proper shoeing and care of horses.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current English entry; the term is archaic and out of common use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an English word; the term derives from the Anglo-Norman French and did not pass into standard Modern English vocabulary.
Editorial note: Because ferreur never established itself as an ordinary English word, the gap between common and legal meaning is not a risk here. Researchers encountering the term in early legal sources will find it exclusively as a term of trade and contract, not a carry-over from everyday speech.
Why It Matters in Research
Ferreur is significant primarily as a window into early English contract law. The Year Book passage cited by Burrill — concerning a covenant between a ferreur and a client to shoe a horse "well and properly" — is among the early materials in which English courts wrestled with the liability of skilled tradesmen for deficient work. This places ferreur adjacent to foundational discussions about assumpsit, warranty of workmanship, and the obligations of artificers and craftsmen.
Researchers using Law Mind sources should be alert to several points:
First, spelling variation is significant. Year Book French was inconsistently transcribed, and you may encounter ferreour, ferrour, or related forms alongside ferreur. A search limited to a single spelling will miss related material.
Second, the term appears almost exclusively in Year Book sources and their digests. It does not survive into modern legal terminology; after the decline of Law French, farrier or horse-shoer replaced it entirely. Researchers working in post-seventeenth-century sources will not encounter it.
Third, the substantive legal question embedded in the Year Book citation — whether a craftsman's promise to do work "well and properly" creates enforceable liability — connects to a much larger and heavily researched body of doctrine. Ferreur itself is a narrow entry point to that broader story.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill's treatment is characteristically spare: he supplies the definition (horse-shoer; farrier), cites the Year Book of 14 Henry VI, page 58, and quotes the relevant passage in Law French: "Si un ferreur face covenant ove moy, à shooer mon chival bien & congeable" — roughly, "If a ferreur makes a covenant with me to shoe my horse well and properly."
Burrill does not analyze the legal significance of the passage beyond identifying the term. Earlier and contemporaneous historical dictionaries, including Cowell's Interpreter and Jacob's Law Dictionary, do not appear to carry entries for ferreur, making Burrill's the most direct reference available among the standard shelf sources. Researchers seeking deeper treatment of the underlying doctrine will need to move from ferreur as a vocabulary entry into the broader Year Book literature on craftsmen's covenants and into secondary scholarship on the prehistory of assumpsit.
Jurisdictional Note
Ferreur is exclusively a historical English legal term. It has no application in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions except as a reference to the same English Year Book materials.