Definition
In French marine law, *fret* is the term for freight — that is, the compensation paid to a shipowner or carrier for the transportation of goods by sea. The word is French in origin and appears in historical legal sources exclusively in the context of admiralty and maritime commerce, particularly in references to the French Ordonnance de la Marine (1681). It carries no independent English legal meaning and is encountered in Anglo-American sources only when those sources quote or summarize French maritime law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The ridged strips of metal, plastic, or wood set across the neck of a guitar or stringed instrument, used to determine pitch when a string is depressed.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 redirects to "frith," indicating the word in its common English sense was not primarily associated with music hardware at that time but with other meanings (enclosed woodland, estuary).
The gap here is absolute rather than subtle: the legal term *fret* is a French maritime word meaning freight, with no connection whatsoever to the common English uses of the word. A researcher encountering *fret* in an admiralty text should not attempt to parse it as English vocabulary at all.
Common Confusion
*Fret* and *fret* (English) are false friends across languages. More practically, *fret* in French maritime law is directly equivalent to *freight* in English maritime law and should not be confused with related but distinct concepts such as *fret de retour* (return freight) or *faux fret* (dead freight — compensation owed when a shipper fails to provide the agreed cargo). Researchers may also conflate *fret* with *nolis* or *nolissement*, which refer to the chartering arrangement itself rather than the freight compensation earned under it.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in admiralty history, comparative maritime law, or the historical development of freight contracts will encounter *fret* primarily in two contexts: direct quotation of or commentary on the French Ordonnance de la Marine of 1681, and English-language treatises on maritime law that synthesized French and English sources during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Works by Valin, Emerigon, and their English interpreters (such as Boulay-Paty) use *fret* extensively, and English treatise writers sometimes carried the French term into their own texts without translation.
The key research trap is terminological: because Anglo-American legal dictionaries define *fret* only briefly — essentially as a pointer to *freight* — a researcher who stops at the dictionary entry will miss that French maritime law developed a substantially more elaborate doctrinal framework around freight obligations than contemporaneous English law did. The Ordonnance de la Marine provisions on *fret* governed not just the rate of compensation but conditions of forfeiture, liability for jettison, and rights against cargo. Tracing how those rules influenced American admiralty courts in the early republic requires following *fret* back to the French primary sources, not merely equating it with the English word freight and moving on.
There are no significant corpus connections within Anglo-American common law proper — *fret* does not appear in equity, contract, or property materials except incidentally.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core point: *fret* is French, it means freight, and it belongs to French marine law. Burrill and Black's (2nd ed.) both cite the Ordonnance de la Marine, livre 3, titre 3, which is the correct primary authority — that title of the Ordonnance is specifically devoted to freight (*Du fret ou nolis*). Black's (1st ed.) identifies the French-law context but omits the Ordonnance citation; the 2nd edition corrects this.
None of the three dictionaries elaborate on what the French law actually provided, nor do they distinguish *fret* from related French maritime concepts. This is a case where the historical dictionaries perform a useful identification function but are research starting points only. A researcher needing substantive content must go directly to the Ordonnance itself or to Valin's commentary.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Freight (Maritime); Ordonnance de la Marine; Admiralty Jurisdiction.