Definition
An archaic Law French verb meaning "to lodge" or "to entertain" as a host. In medieval English legal usage, *herberger* (also encountered in inflected forms) referred to the act of providing lodging or housing to a person, particularly a guest or traveler. The term appears in statutory and treatise contexts regulating how long a host might lawfully shelter a guest before incurring legal responsibility for that guest's conduct or debts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *herberger* in transcriptions of medieval English legal records, Year Books, or early statute compilations should recognize it immediately as a Law French infinitive, not a proper noun or technical term of art with a modern statutory counterpart. Its significance is almost entirely contextual: the word signals a passage dealing with hospitality obligations, innkeeper liability, or vagrancy-adjacent regulation.
Two specific research traps arise. First, the term is easily misread in manuscript or early print sources as a surname or place name — Burrill's note that it is a Law French verb is the essential correction. Second, because the verb form varies (*herberge*, *herbergent*, *herbergera*), keyword searches in digitized sources will miss related passages unless the researcher searches on the stem.
The statutory context Burrill cites — *Articuli super Cartas*, chapter 13 — concerns regulation of purveyance and lodging, a recurring pressure point in medieval English governance. The *Britton* citation (c. 12) sits within that treatise's treatment of innkeepers and hosting obligations. A researcher tracing the legal duties of hosts and innkeepers from medieval through early modern English law should treat *herberger* passages as an early layer in that lineage, connecting forward to later common law innkeeper doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only significant historical legal dictionary treatment of this term. His entry is brief but precise: he gives the French infinitive, translates it as "to lodge" and "to entertain," and supplies two illustrative quotations from primary sources. The *Articuli super Cartas* quotation captures a regulatory prohibition — lodging too frequently in one place — suggesting a concern with itinerant persons of suspect character exploiting hospitality norms. The *Britton* quotation establishes a temporal threshold (more than two nights) after which the host's legal relationship to the guest may change.
No other historical law dictionaries in the standard research corpus appear to have independent entries for this term. Blount's *Nomo-Lexicon* and Jacob's *Law Dictionary* do not carry it as a headword. This means Burrill is the primary secondary authority, and researchers requiring deeper treatment must go directly to the primary sources he cites.