Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning franchise. FRAUNCHISE appears in medieval and early modern legal texts as a variant spelling of the term that, in English law, denoted a special privilege, right, or liberty granted by the sovereign to an individual or corporate body to do something that would otherwise be the exclusive prerogative of the Crown — such as holding a market, operating a ferry, or returning writs. The term carries no independent legal meaning beyond serving as an older orthographic form of FRANCHISE.
Common Confusion
FRAUNCHISE should not be confused with the modern commercial franchise (a licensing arrangement between a franchisor and franchisee), nor with the electoral franchise (the right to vote). All three — the archaic royal privilege, the commercial relationship, and the voting right — descend from the same root concept but diverge sharply in modern legal usage. Researchers encountering FRAUNCHISE in historical sources are almost certainly reading about royal or jurisdictional grants, not commercial licensing agreements.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is navigational: FRAUNCHISE is a spelling variant that will appear in Law French and early English legal records and should be treated as a direct pointer to FRANCHISE. Researchers working with Year Books, plea rolls, early Chancery records, or treatises from the medieval and early Tudor periods may encounter this spelling without recognizing it as the same concept addressed under FRANCHISE in later digests and dictionaries.
Two traps deserve attention. First, indexing in older legal compilations is inconsistent — a manuscript or printed digest may list the term under FRAUNCHISE in one volume and FRANCHISE in another. Researchers who stop at one spelling risk missing parallel material. Second, the conceptual territory of the old royal franchise is substantially narrower than the modern commercial franchise; importing modern assumptions about the term into readings of historical sources will produce anachronistic results. When FRAUNCHISE appears in a historical source, the surrounding context almost always concerns Crown-derived jurisdictional or economic privileges — tollgates, fisheries, wreck of the sea, return of writs — not the business relationship that dominates contemporary franchise law.
The Burrill entry is notable for appearing immediately adjacent to maxims on fraud (FRAUS), which reflects nothing more than alphabetical proximity in a Latin-organized dictionary. There is no substantive connection between FRAUNCHISE and the fraud maxims that follow it in that source; researchers should not read the juxtaposition as implying any legal relationship between the concepts.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are uniform and brief. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence treat FRAUNCHISE as a pure Law French equivalent of franchise, offering no independent definition. Burrill likewise renders it as "a franchise" before moving immediately into Latin fraud maxims that are alphabetically adjacent but substantively unrelated.
The brevity of all four entries is itself informative: by the time these dictionaries were compiled, FRAUNCHISE had no active legal life as a distinct term. It survived in the dictionaries only as a spelling cross-reference for historical completeness. None of the sources attempt to distinguish FRAUNCHISE from FRANCHISE, because no meaningful distinction exists. What the historical dictionaries do not capture is the full doctrinal content of the franchise concept as it operated in medieval English law — for that, researchers must work through the FRANCHISE entry and through primary sources such as Bracton, Britton, and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, where the substance of royal privilege grants is developed.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Franchise (Royal and Jurisdictional Grants); Franchise (Commercial Law)