FOITERERS - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

FOITERERSAuthored

The Law Mind • 709 words

Definition

Foiterers is an archaic legal term denoting vagabonds — persons who wander without fixed abode, visible means of support, or lawful occupation. The term appears in early English law as a descriptive category of persons subject to vagrancy statutes and related penal measures. It carries no technical distinction from the broader category of vagabonds in the sources that record it; the word functions as a synonym rather than a defined subcategory.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term is obsolete and does not appear in modern general usage dictionaries.

Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term had already passed out of common use by the nineteenth century.

Editorial note: Because foiterers survives only in legal dictionaries — and there solely as a one-line cross-reference to vagabonds — there is no meaningful gap between common and legal meaning to analyze. The word is pure historical legal vocabulary with no living common counterpart.

Common Confusion

Foiterers, vagabonds, rogues, and sturdy beggars were distinct terms in early English vagrancy law, though later legal dictionaries — including all four sources here — treat them as interchangeable. Researchers should not assume that historical statutes used these terms synonymously. Tudor and Stuart vagrancy legislation distinguished among categories of wandering persons and attached different penalties to each. A source using foiterers may be tracking a specific statutory category rather than making a general reference to homelessness or idleness.

Why It Matters in Research

Foiterers is almost exclusively a corpus curiosity — a word that survives in legal dictionaries because Blount recorded it, and subsequent compilers copied Blount. Researchers encountering the term in primary sources should treat it as a marker of early modern English law, most likely pointing toward vagrancy statutes from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Several considerations apply:

First, all four Law Mind dictionary sources trace the definition to a single authority: Blount — referring to Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary (1670). This chain-of-authority means the corpus offers no independent verification beyond Blount's own usage. Researchers relying on this term should go directly to Blount rather than treating the dictionary entries as independent corroboration.

Second, the term will not appear in modern statutory compilations or case reporters. Its research utility is confined to historical documents predating the consolidation of vagrancy law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If the term surfaces in a document after approximately 1700, that is itself a notable anachronism worth flagging.

Third, because vagrancy law was local in administration even when national in statutory authority, the practical scope of the term may vary by jurisdiction, court, and era. English ecclesiastical court records, quarter sessions records, and borough court rolls are the most likely primary source locations.

Historical Dictionary Support

All four sources — Black's (1st), Black's (2nd), Bouvier's, and Rapalje & Lawrence — are in complete agreement: foiterers means vagabonds, and the authority is Blount. There is no divergence, no elaboration, and no independent analysis across any of the four entries. Bouvier's entry runs slightly longer but only because the typesetter ran the foiterers entry into the following entry for folc-gemote without a clean break; Bouvier adds nothing substantive to the definition itself.

What the historical sources miss is context. None of them situate foiterers within the structure of early English vagrancy law, distinguish it from neighboring terms such as rogues, beggars, or idle and disorderly persons, or explain why the term fell out of use. For a researcher, the silence of four dictionaries all pointing back to a single seventeenth-century glossary is itself informative: this is a term that never achieved wide legal currency, was recorded by one conscientious compiler, and persisted in legal reference works through institutional inertia rather than continued practical use.

Jurisdictional Note

The term is English in origin and has no documented American legal history. It does not appear in colonial American statutory compilations or in the early American legal dictionaries that adapted English sources for domestic use. Researchers working in American legal history should not expect to find it in primary sources.

FOITERERSmain

Bouvier's Law Dictionary • 1928

Vagabonds, Blount. FOLC-GEMOTE (spelled, also, folk- mote, folcmote, folkgemote; from folc, people, and gemote, an assembly). A general assembly of the people in a town, burgh, or shire. During the time at which the separate tribal nations of Britain were under the control or supre- macy of the kingdoms of Northumbria, York, and West Saxony successively, the term was applied to the concilium of the freeholders of each village. Tacitus calls it the nation assembled in arms. Their meetings were held each fortnight, and the members bound themselves reciprocally to the peaceable behavior of themselves, their families, and their dependents; 2 Burke, Abr. Eng. Hist. ch. 7. They chose their rulers, the fole kings, at this tribal moot, settled matters of unjust trading, the common till- age and pasturage, and all things that concerned the common householder: 1 Soc. Eng. 125, 136. The conqueror so far as possible endeavored to preserve the customs of the people, but with the growth of the royal power the most important questions were referred to the councillors of the king, comprising the bishops, abbots, and eorldermen who succeeded the fole kings in the folks or shires and designated the witenagemote or council of the wise men; this in turn dissolved into the curia regis; Inderwick, King's Peace. About this period the spelling of the word changes from fole-moot to folk-moot. The meeting of the folk-moot was then transferred to London, and was held thrice a year, and the princi- pal duties that devolved upon it were to hear royal proclamations and statutes, to choose mayors and burgesses, and to pronounce upon offenders the sentence of outlawry; 1 Poll. and Maitl. 642. The folk-moot and the witenagemote are said to have been the foundation of the English Parliament. See Stubbs, Sel. Chars. 10-13; Inderwick, King's Peace; Bagehot, Physics and Politics: Manwood, For. Laws: Spelman, Gloss. De Brady, Gloss.; Cunningham, Law Dict.; PARLIAMENT; WITTENAGE-