Definition
An obsolete term from old English law meaning hatred. The word appears in the laws attributed to William the Conqueror and was used to denote the concept of enmity or ill will, particularly in legal contexts where a party's hostility toward another was legally relevant. It has no operative meaning in modern law and survives only as a historical artifact in early Norman-influenced legal texts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are unlikely to encounter HAUR outside of close reading of very early Norman-period English legal sources. Its primary appearance is in the Leges Willelmi (the laws attributed to William I), a body of texts that blends Anglo-Saxon legal tradition with Norman influence and presents significant interpretive challenges due to uncertain dating, authenticity, and transmission. If you are working in the corpus on early English legal history, feudal law, or the reception of Norman law into England, HAUR is the kind of term that marks the text as drawing on this period.
The key navigational point: do not treat HAUR as a doctrine with continuing legal weight. It is a lexical fossil. Its appearance in a source signals that source's antiquity or that the author is citing to early Norman precedent. It carries no technical elements, no formal test, and no jurisdictional variation worth tracing. Historical dictionaries preserve it for completeness; its practical research value is purely contextual and dating-related.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree without meaningful variation: HAUR means hatred in old English law, traceable to the Leges Willelmi. Black's (both editions) and Burrill's give the bare definition and the same primary citation to Leg. Wm. I. c. 16, with Black's additionally noting Blount's Nomo-Lexicon as a secondary authority. Bouvier's adds the most context, situating the term within the laws of William the Conqueror specifically and attributing the source to Tomlin's Law Dictionary.
Bouvier's entry is notable for a structural reason: the dictionary uses HAUR as a brief anchor before proceeding immediately to HAUSTUS, HAUT CHEMIN, and HAUT ESTRET — adjacent terms in the same alphabetical cluster that share the Norman French and Latin character of the period. This sequencing in Bouvier's is a useful reminder that HAUR belongs to a family of Norman-derived legal vocabulary, not an isolated curiosity.
No source disagrees on the definition, and none attempts to extend HAUR beyond the Norman-period context. What the historical dictionaries collectively omit is any discussion of how hatred functioned substantively in the Leges Willelmi — whether it affected proof, procedure, or penalty. That gap reflects the limitations of dictionary treatment of archaic terms and would require direct engagement with the Leges Willelmi text and scholarship on early Norman law to resolve.