Definition
In old English law, a husbandry servant; a farm laborer or agricultural worker bound to service on a landed estate. The term designated a class of rural servant employed in the working of land, distinct from a villein in tenure but similarly associated with agrarian service arrangements in medieval and early modern England.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An adjective meaning located at the rear, most often used of animals' body parts; backward or toward the rear.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The female of the red deer; also a spotted food fish of the genus Epinephelus found in Bermuda and Florida waters.
Neither common meaning — the anatomical directional adjective nor the female deer — has any connection to the legal usage. A researcher encountering "hind" in an old English agrarian or manorial document should not read it as a deer or a directional term; the word there designates a specific class of rural servant.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical English sources dealing with manorial law, agricultural tenancy, and rural labor arrangements. Researchers working with primary documents from medieval or early modern England — estate records, manorial rolls, labor contracts, or agrarian statutes — may encounter "hind" as a descriptor of a servant's status or role.
The principal research trap is the word's modern invisibility: contemporary legal dictionaries do not carry the term, and general-purpose dictionaries will return only the deer or anatomical meanings. A researcher relying on modern sources alone will find no legal signal in the word. Black's 2nd Edition Supplemental carries the entry, but later editions of Black's drop it, making the 2nd Edition Supplemental an important shelf source for archaic agrarian terminology.
The term also illustrates a broader research challenge in English agrarian law: the vocabulary of rural servitude — including villein, serf, cottar, bondman, and hind — does not map cleanly onto modern categories of employment or tenancy, and distinctions among these terms mattered for determining legal rights, obligations, and remedies in historical proceedings.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) Supplemental defines hind simply as "a husbandry servant" in old English law. The entry is brief and does not develop the social or legal context of the term, nor does it distinguish hind from related categories of agrarian servants. No other major historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus appears to carry this term. The sparseness of the entry is itself informative: by the time Black's was compiled, the term had receded far enough from active legal usage that only a passing entry was warranted. Researchers needing deeper context on the legal condition of husbandry servants should look to historical treatises on English agrarian law and manorial organization rather than to legal dictionaries.
---
Jurisdictional Note
This is exclusively a term of old English law. It has no recognized legal meaning in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions, and no modern statutory or judicial usage is known.
---