Definition
A feudal and manorial right by which a lord was entitled to have the sheep of his tenants penned on his own land for a specified period, so that their droppings would fertilize his fields. The right operated as a species of agricultural servitude running with the tenure: the tenant's flock was compelled to fold — that is, to be enclosed overnight or for set periods — on the lord's demesne rather than on the tenant's own ground. The benefit to the lord was practical and economic: concentrated manure improved soil fertility at a time when artificial fertilizers did not exist. In some regions the lord collected a payment in lieu of the actual folding service, and that payment also went by the name foldage. The term therefore describes both the right itself and the dues payable in commutation of it.
Common Confusion
FOLDAGE should not be confused with the broader category of manorial customs concerning livestock. Agistment (the taking in of another's cattle for pasture in exchange for payment), common of pasture, and fold-course (a related East Anglian right governing the route sheep travelled across common fields) are distinct concepts. Fold-course in particular is sometimes treated as interchangeable with foldage in older agrarian literature, but fold-course emphasizes the territorial path and grazing range of the flock, while foldage focuses on the lord's right to the folding service and its fertilizing benefit.
Why It Matters in Research
Foldage is primarily a term of English manorial law and will appear in historical sources far more often than in modern case reports. Researchers should expect to encounter it in:
Manorial court rolls and extents, where the right was recorded as part of the lord's customary dues. These records, held largely in English county archives and the National Archives at Kew, use foldage alongside related terms such as fold-silver (a money payment in lieu of the service).
Enclosure proceedings and enclosure awards from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, where manorial rights including foldage were extinguished, commuted, or transferred as part of reorganizing open-field systems. An award that is silent on foldage may have presumptively extinguished it or rolled it into compensation.
Copyhold conveyancing materials, where the survival or extinguishment of foldage as a burden on customary tenure affected land values and title searches. The Copyhold Acts of the nineteenth century and the Law of Property Act 1922 progressively enfranchised copyhold and commuted surviving manorial incidents; foldage effectively ceased to exist as an enforceable English right following that legislation.
American researchers will rarely encounter foldage in domestic sources because the feudal manorial system was not transplanted to the American colonies in operative form. The term appears in American legal dictionaries primarily for completeness and for researchers interpreting colonial-era grants or land descriptions that echoed English conveyancing language.
The principal research trap is anachronism: finding foldage in a sixteenth-century extent and assuming it had the same practical content and enforceability as it would in an eighteenth-century copyhold dispute. The right's content, enforcement mechanisms, and commutation value shifted considerably over that span.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define foldage as the right the lord had to require his tenants to fold their cattle on his land, and note that the term also covers the fee paid in lieu of that service. The definition is compact and accurate as far as it goes but does not address the geographic concentration of the right (it was particularly well-documented in East Anglia and the Midland open-field counties), the procedural context of manorial courts, or the legislative history of its eventual abolition.
Older English legal dictionaries, including Termes de la Ley and the various editions of Jacob's Law Dictionary, treat foldage as settled manorial vocabulary without significant disagreement on its core meaning. Where sources diverge is on the relationship between foldage and fold-course: some authorities treat them as synonyms, others as distinct. The distinction drawn above — foldage as the fertilizing service or its commuted payment, fold-course as the territorial grazing right — reflects the more careful modern agrarian-history scholarship and should be preferred for precision.
No English legal dictionary surveyed adequately addresses the legislative abolition of foldage as a manorial incident. Researchers relying solely on historical dictionaries will not find guidance on that point and should consult the copyhold enfranchisement statutes and commentary directly.
Jurisdictional Note
Foldage as an enforceable right is exclusively English in origin and was effectively abolished in England and Wales by the Law of Property Act 1922 and related legislation. It has no operative existence in modern American, Canadian, or Commonwealth jurisdictions, though it may appear as historical background in land title disputes involving colonial-era instruments or in academic treatments of feudal tenure.