Definition
In old English law, to give or find security or surety for the performance of some legal obligation; to pledge or wage. The term derives from Law French and functions as a verb form meaning the act of providing a formal guarantee, most commonly encountered in two specific procedural contexts:
1. Gager ley (also gager de ley): To wage law; to give security that one will make or perform one's law — that is, to swear an oath supported by compurgators that a debt or obligation does not exist. This was the formal initiation of the archaic trial procedure known as wager of law.
2. Gager deliverance: To give security for the delivery of goods or a person; the pledging of surety as a precondition to the release of property or the replevin of chattels.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A surname.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A measurer; see Gauger.
The common English word "gauger" (a customs official who measures casks) and the surname "Gager" bear no relationship to the legal term. Researchers encountering "gager" in medieval or early modern legal records should not infer any connection to measurement, customs, or revenue law. The legal term is a wholly distinct Anglo-Norman procedural word.
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Common Confusion
GAGER is frequently elided with WAGER in historical transcriptions and later legal commentary, since both derive from the same root concept of pledging. The distinction matters: wager of law (wager de ley) refers to the trial procedure itself and to the underlying oath; gager ley refers to the preliminary act of providing security and formally initiating that procedure. The two terms describe sequential stages of the same process, not synonyms for the same stage. Similarly, gager deliverance should not be confused with REPLEVIN as a general remedy — gager deliverance is specifically the giving of the security bond, not the remedy or the writ itself.
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Why It Matters in Research
GAGER is a procedural artifact of medieval English common law and will appear almost exclusively in Year Books, early plea rolls, and treatises from the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on wager of law, compurgation, or early common law pleading should treat gager ley as a terminus technicus marking a distinct procedural moment — the defendant's formal pledge — rather than a generic reference to oaths or proof.
The term drops out of active legal usage after wager of law was abolished by statute in England (3 & 4 Will. 4, c. 42, 1833). Post-abolition legal dictionaries either omit it entirely or treat it as a historical curiosity, so its absence from later sources is not an error but a reflection of the procedure's extinction. American legal materials will rarely contain the term, as wager of law never took firm root in colonial American practice.
When searching the corpus, note that Law French orthography is inconsistent across manuscripts and printed editions: gager, gaiger, gagger, and gage (used as a verb) all appear for the same concept. Cross-searching on ley, deliverance, and wager of law will recover most instances where gager itself is not spelled consistently.
The connection to gager deliverance is important for researchers working on replevin and distress proceedings. Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium (F.N.B. 67, 74), cited in Burrill, remains the primary treatise anchor for that usage and is the appropriate starting point for corpus research in that context.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only source dictionary available for this entry, and its treatment is appropriately concise: it identifies the Law French root, gives both principal compound forms, and cites Year Book authority (Yearb. 14 Hen. VI. 22) alongside Fitzherbert and Britton. These citations are reliable primary anchors. Burrill correctly situates gager as a term of procedure rather than substance.
What Burrill does not address — and what later dictionaries similarly omit — is any discussion of why the term survived in the law French verbal form rather than being anglicized. This reflects a broader pattern in medieval English legal vocabulary where procedural pledging terms (gage, wage, gager, vadium) persisted in their French or Latin forms long after surrounding text shifted to English. Researchers should treat this as a feature of the genre, not an anomaly.
Bouvier and Black's Law Dictionary editions largely subsume this term under WAGER OF LAW without preserving the procedural granularity that Burrill maintains.
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Jurisdictional Note
GAGER as an active legal term is exclusively a feature of historical English common law. It has no surviving operational meaning in any modern jurisdiction. American courts and commentators have discussed wager of law historically but the gager procedure itself never acquired independent procedural status in American legal systems.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: WAGER OF LAW
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