Definition
A term from French marine law meaning to freight a ship — that is, to hire out a vessel for the carriage of cargo, or to let the ship to another party for that purpose. The term describes the act of the shipowner (or those acting on the owner's behalf) in placing the vessel at a charterer's disposal in exchange for freight or hire. It is the operative verb underlying the contractual relationship that English law addresses through charterparty and affreightment.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term does not appear in modern general English dictionaries.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term was not recorded in general American usage at the close of the nineteenth century.
Editorial note: FRETER is untranslated French legal vocabulary that passed into anglophone legal dictionaries as a term of art rather than an adopted English word. Researchers encountering it in texts should treat it as a signal that the source is drawing from French maritime law tradition, not from common law or admiralty sources developed in English.
Common Confusion
FRETER should not be read as an anglicized form of any English legal term. Researchers sometimes conflate it loosely with TO FREIGHT or TO CHARTER, both of which are approximate English equivalents but carry distinct doctrinal weight in admiralty and shipping law. TO FREIGHT in English refers specifically to the loading or hiring of a vessel for cargo; CHARTERPARTY is the formal instrument by which such hiring is effected. FRETER corresponds most closely to the act that gives rise to a charterparty, but the French term carries no fixed common law procedural or evidentiary baggage that the English equivalents do.
Why It Matters in Research
FRETER appears in anglophone legal dictionaries almost exclusively as a passthrough citation to French marine law treatises, particularly Emerigon's Traité des Assurances et des Contrats à la Grosse (published 1783). Its presence in a source text is a reliable indicator that the author is working from French or civil law maritime tradition rather than English admiralty common law. This matters for corpus researchers because the doctrinal rules governing freight, charterparty, and shipowner liability differ meaningfully between the French civil law tradition and English admiralty.
The term does not appear to have generated its own body of English-language case law or statutory usage. Any research path beginning with FRETER should pivot quickly to AFFREIGHTMENT, CHARTERPARTY, and FREIGHT as the operative English-law and American admiralty-law counterparts. Researchers working in historical insurance law contexts — particularly disputes over marine insurance — will find that Emerigon's treatise, from which all three historical dictionary entries draw, was frequently cited in both English and American courts through the nineteenth century as persuasive authority on marine insurance doctrine, even where the French terminology itself was not adopted.
There is no evidence that FRETER developed independent legal meaning in American or English law. Its dictionary entries across all three sources are substantially identical and trace to a single citation, which suggests the compilers treated it as definitional background for understanding French source material rather than as a term with operative domestic legal force.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical dictionary entries are in close agreement, differing only in minor formatting of the Emerigon citation. Black's (1st ed.) and Burrill's are essentially identical. Black's (2nd ed.) reproduces the substance but with a minor transcription disorder in the source line, rendering "Fr. Fo freight a ship" — an apparent typographic error for "Fr. To freight a ship." No historical dictionary extends the definition beyond the single-line gloss or provides doctrinal elaboration.
The uniformity of the entries across sources suggests that none of the compilers had independent French marine law expertise on this point; all drew from the same narrow citation to Emerigon. What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any account of how FRETER functioned within the broader French law of charterparty (affrètement) or how French courts treated disputes arising from the freight relationship. Researchers needing that doctrinal depth must consult Emerigon directly or secondary scholarship on French marine law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: AFFREIGHTMENT; CHARTERPARTY; FREIGHT (MARITIME)