Definition
An ash-tree. In early Anglo-Norman legal usage, *freine* (plural: *freines*) denoted the ash-tree specifically, appearing in Law French pleadings and records where trees or timber on land were described or disputed. The term is a Law French rendering of the Latin *fraxinus*.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *freine* will find it almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records written in Law French — the specialized legal dialect used in English courts from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. Its practical significance arises in timber disputes, waste actions, and conveyancing records where specific tree species were named, since the law of waste distinguished carefully between different types of trees and their value as timber.
The term is unlikely to appear in post-seventeenth-century sources after Law French was formally displaced from English court records. If you encounter *freine* in a printed law report, you are almost certainly reading an early English report in its original Law French or a direct quotation from one. Burrill's citation to Dyer 35b points to Sir James Dyer's *Reports*, an authoritative collection of sixteenth-century English cases — one of the earliest printed English law report series — which survive in both Law French and translated editions. Researchers consulting Dyer should be alert to the French edition versus English translation, as botanical and property terms of this kind sometimes lose precision in translation.
No jurisdictional variation is meaningful here: this is a term of historical English law with no continuing independent life in any modern common law jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief and functional: it identifies *freine* as Law French derived from Latin *fraxinus*, translates it as ash-tree, provides the plural *freines*, and cites Dyer. There is nothing to synthesize across multiple sources because the term is a simple vocabulary item of Law French rather than a legal concept with doctrinal content. Burrill's treatment is representative of how nineteenth-century legal lexicographers handled Law French botanical and land-description terms — recording them for the benefit of practitioners and scholars reading early reports, without elaboration. No substantive legal doctrine attaches to *freine* itself; its significance is entirely as a descriptive term within larger legal instruments or pleadings.