Definition
Free bord is a historical English land law term referring to a strip of land lying immediately outside a boundary fence or enclosure, to which the owner of the enclosed land was entitled as an allowance or customary right. The strip was typically measured at approximately two and a half feet in width, running along the outer edge of the fence line.
The concept recognized that a landowner erecting a fence needed some margin of land beyond the fence itself — to seat fence posts, maintain the structure, and manage the boundary — even though the fence's outward face marked the practical limit of visible enclosure. Free bord functioned as a customary entitlement attached to the act of enclosing land, not as a separately conveyed parcel.
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Common Language
This is pure legal and historical land terminology with no meaningful counterpart in modern ordinary English. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted.
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Why It Matters in Research
Free bord is an archaic term unlikely to appear in modern American legal sources but relevant in several research contexts:
Historical land disputes. Researchers working with colonial-era or early American boundary records, particularly in jurisdictions that inherited English common law land customs, may encounter free bord claims in surveying records, deed disputes, or enclosure controversies. The term identifies a specific customary right, not merely a descriptive measurement.
Enclosure history. Free bord is closely connected to the English enclosure movement and the customs that governed the fencing of formerly open or common land. Research into manorial records, agrarian history, or the legal history of property boundaries will encounter the term in its proper context.
Surveying and metes-and-bounds records. Early boundary surveys sometimes noted free bord allowances as part of how fence lines were described. A researcher misreading a survey that incorporates a free bord strip as the boundary itself may miscalculate the actual property line by the width of that strip.
Terminological obsolescence. Free bord does not appear as a live doctrine in modern American property law. Where the underlying concept survives — a property owner's right to minimal access or maintenance space along a boundary — it has been absorbed into easement law, boundary fence statutes, or local ordinance, under entirely different terminology. Researchers should not expect free bord to appear in modern case law except in historical quotation.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole historical legal dictionary source available for this entry, and its treatment is brief: free bord is defined as an allowance of land outside the fence, approximately two and a half feet wide, to which the enclosing owner is entitled. Bouvier cites Blount and Cowel — both English legal glossaries of the seventeenth century — as his authorities, indicating that the term was already archaic by the time American legal dictionaries were compiled.
The definition is consistent across the English legal glossary tradition. Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon (1670) and John Cowel's The Interpreter treat free bord as a customary local right, not a universal common law entitlement, suggesting its application varied by locality and was never systematically codified. Bouvier's brief treatment reflects that the term had negligible live application in American law even in the nineteenth century.
What the historical sources do not address: the precise legal mechanism by which free bord was claimed, whether it was understood as a form of easement, a customary right appurtenant to ownership, or something closer to a prescriptive entitlement. The brevity of the entries in all sources suggests contemporaneous practitioners treated it as self-evident custom rather than doctrine requiring analysis.
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Jurisdictional Note
Free bord as a distinct legal doctrine does not appear to have been adopted as operative law in American jurisdictions. Its relevance is confined to historical English land law and the customs of specific English localities. Researchers encountering the term in American sources are almost certainly reading either a direct quotation from English authority or a historical land record from a period of close doctrinal borrowing.
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