Definition
In old European law, a freedman: a person who had been formally released from bondage or servitude. The term designates the legal status acquired upon manumission — the act by which an enslaved person or serf was freed by a lord or master — and is roughly equivalent to the Latin terms libertus and libertinus, and to the Roman and medieval concept of the manumissus.
The frilazin occupied a distinct social and legal position: no longer a slave or bondsman, but not fully equal in status to a person born free (ingenuus). This intermediate condition — freed but still marked by the taint of prior servitude — was recognized across the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon legal traditions and carried practical consequences for inheritance, testimony, oath-taking capacity, and the ability to hold land.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter frilazin almost exclusively in treatments of early medieval European law — Anglo-Saxon dooms, Frankish capitularies, and secondary works reconstructing pre-Norman social structure. The term will not appear in common law pleading records, equity proceedings, or any post-Conquest English legal source. Its relevance is confined to historical and comparative legal scholarship.
The key research trap is conflating frilazin with full freedom. The historical sources are consistent that the freedman class was legally inferior to the freeborn. When reading early medieval legal texts — whether in Latin, Old English, or Old High German — the distinction between servus (slave), libertus/frilazin (freedman), and ingenuus (freeborn free person) is load-bearing. Collapsing these categories produces misreadings of wergild tables, inheritance rules, and testimony requirements.
Researchers working in comparative legal history should also note that the Latin terms libertus and libertinus, which Burrill equates to frilazin, carry their own layered history from Roman law — where they designated the freed slave and his descendants respectively — into the medieval period, where the distinction between the two was not always preserved. When a medieval source uses libertinus, it may mean something different from a classical Roman source using the same word.
Cross-corpus connections: entries for MANUMISSION, VILLEIN, SERF, LIBERTUS, and WERGILD will provide essential context for understanding where frilazin fits in the broader taxonomy of medieval legal status. The feudal status hierarchy is more granular than modern readers expect, and frilazin marks only one node within it.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary source for this term in the Law Mind corpus. The entry is brief but well-grounded: Burrill traces the word to Anglo-Germanic roots (freo, free; laschen, to let go), glosses it as manumissus, libertus, or libertinus, and cites Spelman and Crabb's History for authority. This is typical of Burrill's handling of archaic Germanic legal vocabulary — lexical reconstruction supported by the standard antiquarian sources of his era.
Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum and Crabb's History of English Law were the standard references for this class of terms in nineteenth-century English legal antiquarianism. Researchers should be aware that these sources were working from fragmentary evidence and that modern medieval scholarship — drawing on more fully edited charter, doom, and capitulary collections — may refine or complicate the picture Burrill presents.
No other dictionary in the current Law Mind corpus indexes this term. Its absence from later dictionaries (including Black's) reflects the term's confinement to early medieval sources and its displacement by Latin equivalents in the learned tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
Frilazin is not a term of any modern legal system. Its geographic scope is the early medieval Germanic and Anglo-Saxon world — broadly, northwestern Europe before and immediately after the Norman Conquest. It does not survive as operative legal vocabulary in any common law or civil law jurisdiction.