Definition
FUL is an archaic term of uncertain independent standing, appearing in early English legal sources. Based on available source material, the term is likely a fragment or abbreviated form encountered in manuscript Latin legal texts — most plausibly a truncation of *fugitivus* (fugitive) or related to the Latin root underlying "flight" (*fuga*) in the context of Anglo-Norman and medieval English law.
In the context in which Burrill records surrounding material, the operative legal concept concerns the status of persons or animals that have departed from lawful custody, habitual return, or domestic attachment. A person or creature classed as a fugitive (*fugitivus*) lost the legal protections and presumptions that attended those who remained within the bounds of lawful association or possession.
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Common Confusion
Because FUL appears as an isolated fragment in the source material — embedded within a broader passage about flight and fugitives — researchers should not treat it as a self-contained defined term. It is most likely a scribal abbreviation, a manuscript truncation, or a contextual particle rather than a standalone legal concept. Confusion arises when such fragments are catalogued as independent entries rather than as components of a larger doctrinal passage.
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Why It Matters in Research
This entry illustrates a recurring hazard in working with historical legal dictionaries: the appearance of partial words, Latin abbreviations, or manuscript fragments as apparent headwords. Burrill's Law Dictionary, like other nineteenth-century compilations, was assembled from a wide range of primary sources — including Bracton, Fleta, and Year Book manuscripts — where scribal abbreviation was common and page references (here, *Bract. fol. 6b*) anchor the text to specific folios rather than to a coherent doctrinal unit.
For researchers working in the Law Mind corpus:
1. **Manuscript fragmentation**: When a term appears with no full definition and only a surrounding passage for context, trace the folio reference directly. *Bracton, fol. 6b* deals with the nature of wild and tamed animals (*ferae naturae* vs. *mansuetae naturae*) and the point at which a tamed creature reverts to wild status — a question directly connected to property rights and possession.
2. **Fugitive doctrine connection**: The substantive law embedded in this passage concerns the legal threshold at which animals (and by doctrinal analogy, persons) who have left a place of habitual return cease to be the legal property or responsibility of their former holder. This is a meaningful area of medieval English property and villein law.
3. **Do not over-index fragments**: Researchers should resist building arguments on isolated abbreviated forms. Verify against the full Bracton folio and cross-reference with Fleta and Britton for corroborating doctrine.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry places FUL within a passage discussing *fugitivi* — fugitives — specifically in the context of domesticated animals (*vorum domesticorum*) that lose their legal status as domestic creatures when they abandon the habit of returning. The citation to *Bracton, fol. 6b* is traceable to Henry de Bracton's *De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae*, where Bracton addresses the classification of animals by nature and habit as a means of determining property rights.
The analogy drawn — comparing tamed deer that stop returning to human fugitives — is characteristic of Bracton's method: using natural-law reasoning to derive property rules. This passage would have been understood by medieval readers as addressing both literal livestock and, by implication, villeins or bondsmen who absconded from a lord's land.
What historical dictionaries miss: Burrill's entry, as preserved, does not supply FUL with a discrete definition because none existed as an independent term. The fragment appears to be a cataloguing artifact. Nineteenth-century legal dictionaries occasionally reproduced folio passages without fully distinguishing headwords from surrounding textual matter.
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Jurisdictional Note
The doctrine embedded in this passage is specific to medieval English common law and has no direct modern statutory equivalent. Its descendant concepts — fugitive recovery, reversion of property, and the law of animals — survive in modern common law jurisdictions in substantially transformed forms.
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