Definition
In old English law, followers or servants — specifically, those persons who attended upon or served others in a dependent capacity. The term denotes a class of attendants or retainers bound to another, typically a lord or superior, by obligation of service or personal allegiance.
Why It Matters in Research
FOLGHERES is an archaic Saxon legal term that will appear almost exclusively in pre-Norman and early common law sources. Researchers encountering the word in medieval English legal documents, plea rolls, or treatises should treat it as a term of social and legal status rather than a term of art with ongoing doctrinal significance. Its primary relevance is taxonomic: medieval English law distinguished carefully among classes of persons — freemen, villeins, servants, retainers — and the designation folgheres placed individuals within a recognized category of dependent service that could affect their legal capacity, liability, and the rights of their lord over them.
The term appears in Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, one of the foundational texts of early English common law, which is the primary primary-source context in which a researcher will encounter it. Because Bracton wrote in Latin with frequent incorporation of Saxon terminology, readers working through that text should be alert to the way Saxon social vocabulary was being absorbed and partially systematized within an emerging Latin legal framework. FOLGHERES is one such term — Saxon in origin, Latin-inflected in its glossing, and embedded in a passage addressing the status and legal position of those in dependent relationships.
No modern doctrinal equivalent exists. Researchers should not attempt to map the term onto contemporary employment, agency, or servant-at-common-law doctrine without careful historical qualification. The social relationship it describes — personal followership or retainership — dissolved as a recognized legal category well before the classical common law period.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source to define this term, and its entry is characteristically sparse: a gloss ("followers or servants"), a note on Saxon origin, and a single citation to Bracton. Burrill quotes the relevant phrase as "Aliqui illis deserviunt, qui dicuntur folgheres" — "some serve them, who are called folgheres" — situating the term within Bracton's discussion of persons who stand in a serving or dependent relationship to another.
No other standard historical dictionaries in the legal lexicographic tradition — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Bouvier's — appear to carry an entry for this term, which confirms its status as a highly specialized piece of archaic Saxon vocabulary rather than a term with sustained common law currency. Burrill's willingness to include such terms reflects his comparative breadth as a lexicographer, but researchers should note that even Burrill provides no substantive doctrinal elaboration beyond the Bracton citation.
The limitation of the historical record here is real: what folgheres meant in practice — the precise duties owed, the legal consequences of the status, how courts treated disputes involving such persons — is not recoverable from dictionary sources alone and requires direct engagement with Bracton and with the secondary scholarship on Anglo-Saxon and early Norman social structure.
Jurisdictional Note
Exclusively an English legal term of the pre-classical common law period. It has no reception history in American law and no recognized counterpart in Scots, Irish, or Continental legal systems.