Definition
An archaic term appearing in old English law records, used to denote flood or flood-tide. The Latin form FOESA appears as a variant in the same sources, where it carried the secondary sense of grass or herbage. The term is encountered almost exclusively in medieval English land and ecclesiastical records and has no operative meaning in modern law.
Why It Matters in Research
FLUD is a paleographic and lexical trap for researchers working in medieval English land records, monastic cartularies, or early common law pleadings. Its primary hazard is ambiguity: the same abbreviated or corrupted form in a manuscript may refer to flood-tide (relevant to riparian or tidal boundary questions) or to herbage and pasture rights (relevant to common land or glebe disputes). The Burrill citation to 2 Mon. Angl. 906b situates the term firmly in monastic record-keeping, suggesting its most frequent appearance will be in ecclesiastical land grants and surveys rather than in royal court pleadings.
Researchers using Law Mind corpus sources that touch on Anglo-Norman or early Latin records should treat FLUD as a localized term requiring contextual disambiguation. The tidal meaning bears on questions of foreshore rights and the historic boundary between terra firma and the sea—subjects that continued to generate litigation well into the modern period under different vocabulary. The herbage meaning connects to rights of common and glebe land administration, which also persisted in English law long after the word itself fell out of use.
Do not assume either meaning without cross-checking the surrounding record. The presence of essoniation language (essoniato) in the Burrill illustrative quotation signals a procedural context (excusing appearance in court), which suggests the herbage sense may have appeared in contexts of pleading excuse from suit owed to a lord, possibly tied to seasonal or land-use conditions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source to record this term, and its treatment is brief. Burrill equates FLUD with flood or flood-tide and notes the Latin variant FOESA, then supplies the herbage gloss with a direct citation to the Monasticon Anglicanum, the standard collection of English monastic records. This is a responsible citation: the Monasticon is a genuine and substantial source for medieval ecclesiastical land tenure, and the reference gives the term documentary grounding rather than treating it as mere lexicographic tradition.
No other historical legal dictionary in the standard Law Mind shelf—not Black's, not Bouvier, not Tomlin—appears to have picked up this term. Its absence from those sources confirms its status as a relic of medieval record language rather than a term that entered the common law vocabulary in any lasting way. Researchers should not expect cross-confirmation from other dictionaries and should treat Burrill as the endpoint of lexicographic support, requiring them to go directly to primary record sources for any substantive research use.