Definition
An old English legal term of Latin origin meaning to chase, hunt, or drive. In medieval English law, fugare carried two distinct but related senses:
1. To hunt or course game — specifically, to pursue and hunt deer or other wild animals by coursing (pursuing on foot or horseback until the animal is exhausted). The phrase feras cursu premere et venari, meaning to press upon beasts by pursuit and to hunt them, captures the technical sense as it appeared in forest and hunting law.
2. To drive cattle — as in the compound phrase fugare et refugare catalla, meaning to drive cattle to and fro. This sense appears in contexts involving rights of way, common lands, and disputes over livestock management, where the lawful movement of animals across land was a matter of formal legal right or grievance.
Common Language
No Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 entry exists for fugare as an English word. The term is Latin and entered English legal usage directly through the medieval legal vocabulary of forest law, manorial courts, and common rights. It has no meaningful presence in ordinary modern or historical English outside legal and ecclesiastical Latin contexts. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted accordingly.
Why It Matters in Research
Fugare is a term a researcher is unlikely to encounter outside of pre-modern English legal sources — specifically records touching forest law, hunting franchises, manorial rights, and common rights over land. Its significance lies almost entirely in reading and interpreting historical documents rather than in understanding modern doctrine.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
The hunting sense and the cattle-driving sense are distinct legal contexts. Encountering fugare in a forest law plea roll calls for attention to rights of chase, warren, or free warren. Encountering it in a manorial dispute or common rights context — especially in the company of catalla (cattle) — signals a livestock or right-of-way dispute. Conflating the two senses can misdirect interpretation.
The term appears in sources dealing with the elaborate hierarchy of English hunting rights — the right of free chase, free warren, and the royal forest — where precise Latin vocabulary carried exact legal meaning and defined the scope of a lord's franchise. A right to fugare in one forest context did not necessarily imply a broader hunting franchise.
Researchers working with Year Books, forest eyre records, or manorial court rolls will need fugare as a reading tool. It is unlikely to appear in equity records, common law pleadings of any sophistication, or post-medieval sources. Its presence is a reliable indicator of medieval vintage.
The phrase fugare et refugare — to drive back and forth — appears in contexts that may signal a claim of wrongful interference with livestock or an assertion of a right to drive animals across another's land. This connects to broader research on easements, common of pasture, and drove roads in English agrarian law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source carrying this term, and its entry is characteristically compact but reliable. Burrill draws on Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum for the hunting sense and on Blount's Nomo-Lexicon for the cattle-driving phrase, two of the most authoritative early modern glossaries of English legal Latin. The reference to 2 Show. 489 (Shower's Reports) points toward a post-medieval case citation, suggesting the term persisted into early modern pleading contexts at least occasionally.
What Burrill does not do is trace the boundary between fugare as a hunting right and fugare as a cattle-management term — the entry presents both uses adjacently without distinguishing the legal regimes from which each arose. For practical research, those regimes are different enough that the distinction matters. Spelman's own entry for Fugacia (the substantive form, meaning a chase or hunting right) provides a useful complement, and researchers working deeply in this area should consult Spelman directly alongside Burrill.
No other historical dictionary in the standard Law Mind shelf — not Bouvier, not Black's in its early editions, not Tomlins — carries fugare as a headword. This is consistent with the term's narrow medieval application and its obsolescence as living legal vocabulary by the time American legal dictionaries were being compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
Fugare is exclusively a term of English legal history. It has no American legal application. Researchers encountering it are working in the context of English common law before approximately 1700, and the relevant jurisdictional frame is the medieval and early modern common law of England, including forest law administered through the forest eyres and manorial law administered through local courts.