Definition
A Latin phrase from old English law meaning a drove of cattle. The term designated a collective unit of cattle moving together, typically in the context of livestock management, pasture rights, or related feudal and manorial arrangements. It appears in medieval legal and administrative records where precise enumeration of livestock was material to questions of property, common rights, and feudal obligation.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in archaic English legal sources — primarily Fleta and Blount's Glossographia — and is unlikely to appear in modern case law or statutes. Researchers encountering it will almost always be working in medieval or early modern English records: manorial court rolls, records of common pasture disputes, or treatises on feudal land tenure.
The chief research trap is the phrase itself. Fuga derives from the Latin fugere (to flee or drive), here used in its older sense of a drove or flight of animals — not flight or escape in the fugitive sense. A researcher unfamiliar with this usage may misread the term in a manuscript context. The catallorum component (genitive plural of catallum, cattle or chattels) is more recognizable but reinforces the importance of distinguishing cattle as livestock from chattels as moveable property more broadly. In the period when this term was current, the two concepts were closely related — cattle being among the most significant form of moveable wealth — but the legal contexts they appear in can differ.
Rapalje and Lawrence add a detail absent from the other dictionaries: they define the term as a drove of eighteen years of cattle, which likely reflects a specific customary or manorial rule about the size or age composition of such a drove. This gloss, attributed to Blount, is worth noting but should be treated cautiously. Blount's Glossographia is a seventeenth-century work synthesizing earlier custom, and its numerics may reflect a specific local usage rather than a universal rule. Researchers relying on this definition should verify against Fleta directly or against the manorial records at issue.
The term has no meaningful modern legal application and no jurisdictional variation worth tracking. It is essentially a glossary entry for historical English land and livestock law.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four shelf sources agree on the core definition: a drove of cattle. All four cite Blount as authority; Bouvier and Rapalje & Lawrence additionally cite Fleta, a thirteenth-century Latin legal treatise. The sources are essentially unanimous and brief, which reflects the term's narrow and archaic scope.
The sole substantive divergence is Rapalje and Lawrence's inclusion of "eighteen years" as a qualifier — a detail the other three dictionaries omit entirely. Whether this represents a specific customary size standard, a transcription artifact, or a copyist's interpolation from a particular passage in Blount is unclear. Researchers who need precision on this point should consult Blount's Glossographia directly rather than relying on the secondary dictionary gloss.
None of the historical dictionaries provide context about how the term functioned within manorial or pasture law — what legal consequence, if any, attached to designating a group of livestock as a fuga catallorum. This is a gap in the shelf sources. For substantive context, researchers should look to the primary sources: Fleta, and scholarship on English manorial land tenure and common pasture rights.