Definition
A henohman is an archaic Anglo-Saxon term denoting a personal attendant, page, or herald — an individual who served in close personal attendance to a lord or person of rank. The term appears in early English legal and historical texts and has no active function in modern law.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter this term in one of two contexts: (1) early English legal history materials dealing with feudal household offices and personal service obligations, or (2) annotated case law touching on historical terminology in evidentiary or definitional disputes. The Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) reference to *Barnes v. State*, 88 Md. 347, 41 Atl. 781 (Md. 1897), indicates the term surfaced in at least one American judicial proceeding, likely in a context requiring construction of an archaic term's meaning rather than application of any doctrine attached to it. Researchers working in Anglo-Saxon legal history, feudal tenure, or the history of household service offices should treat this as a term of historical description rather than a term carrying independent legal weight. It will not appear in modern statutory codes or contemporary case law. If encountered in an older primary source, the meaning is consistently stable: personal attendant or herald to a superior.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines henohman as "a page; an attendant; a herald," and points to *Barnes v. State* as its single judicial reference. The definition is brief and offers no elaboration on the term's origins or range of application in historical sources. No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — including Bouvier's Law Dictionary or Jacob's Law Dictionary — appear to carry this term as a standalone entry, suggesting it was considered sufficiently obscure even by the nineteenth century to require only passing notice. The term belongs to a cluster of Anglo-Saxon household and service terms that survived into early Norman-period records before dropping from legal usage entirely. Black's treatment is consistent with the term's narrow historical footprint: a word of descriptive rather than operative legal significance, preserved in the dictionary primarily as an aid to readers encountering it in old English sources.
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