Definition
Frank bank is an archaic term of old English law meaning free bench (francus bancus in Law Latin; frank bank in Law French). It denotes the widow's right to hold a portion of her deceased husband's copyhold land as a freehold interest after his death, as a form of dower derived from the custom of the manor. The right arose not from common law but from manorial custom, and its incidents — including whether the widow forfeited the right upon remarriage or unchastity — varied from manor to manor.
The term is encountered almost exclusively in historical sources and has no operative meaning in modern law. It survives in legal dictionaries as a cross-reference term pointing researchers toward the substantive doctrine treated under FREE BENCH.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Free bench.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not independently defined; not part of ordinary English vocabulary.
The words "frank" and "bank" each carry common English meanings — "frank" suggesting openness or freedom, "bank" suggesting a financial institution or a raised earthwork — neither of which has any bearing on this term's legal meaning. The phrase is a Law French compound with no intuitive connection to its legal subject matter. Researchers encountering it for the first time should resist any impulse to interpret it through modern English.
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Common Confusion
Frank bank is occasionally confused with terms in modern banking law because of the superficial resemblance of "bank" to financial institutions, and because the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) has made "Frank" a familiar word in contemporary legal research. The connection is purely coincidental. Frank bank belongs entirely to the law of copyhold tenure and manorial custom — a field of English real property law that was effectively abolished by the Law of Property Act 1922 — and has no relationship to financial regulation, deposit banking, or any modern legal doctrine.
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Why It Matters in Research
Frank bank is a navigational term, not a substantive one. Its sole research function is to redirect the researcher to FREE BENCH, where the doctrine is fully treated. Key navigational points:
First, the term appears in Littleton's Tenures (§ 166) and Coke on Littleton (110b), the foundational sources for copyhold and manorial custom in the English common law tradition. Researchers working in those texts or their commentaries will encounter frank bank as a passing reference, not as an independent subject of analysis.
Second, because the term is Law French in origin, it may appear in variant spellings in manuscript and early printed sources — franc bank, frank-bank, or the Latinized francus bancus. Search strategies in digitized historical corpora should account for these variants.
Third, the doctrine of free bench (and therefore frank bank) is historically local in the strongest sense: it existed only where manorial custom created it, and its content differed across manors. This means no general statement about the right's content is reliable without identifying the specific manor's custom. Researchers working in English local history, estate records, or early land title chains need to locate the particular manor's customary rolls.
Fourth, frank bank has no meaningful presence in American law. Colonial American land tenure did not transplant the copyhold system, and free bench has no recognized common law equivalent in the United States. American legal dictionaries include the term for completeness, not because it has practical application in domestic research.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary agree precisely: both define frank bank as free bench, both cite Littleton § 166 and Coke on Littleton 110b, and both treat the entry as a cross-reference rather than an independent doctrinal explanation. Burrill adds a citation to Calthrop's Reports (165), an early seventeenth-century English reporter, which Black's omits.
Neither dictionary elaborates on the substantive content of the right, confirming that even in the historical dictionary tradition, frank bank was understood as a pointer term. The historical dictionaries add nothing beyond what the cross-reference to FREE BENCH provides; researchers should treat frank bank entries as confirmation that they have found the right term, not as a source of doctrine.
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Jurisdictional Note
Frank bank is a term of English manorial law and has no jurisdictional application outside England and Wales. It does not appear in Scottish, Irish, or American legal traditions as an operative doctrine.
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