Definition
In Old English and early medieval law, *hine fare* refers to the departure or loss of a servant from his master — specifically, the act or fact of a bound servant or agricultural laborer leaving the lord or household to whom service was owed. The term appears in Domesday Book contexts and reflects the legal significance attached to the movement or alienation of dependent laborers in the manorial system. The departure of a *hine* (a household serf or agricultural servant) was not a neutral event; it implicated the lord's property interest in the labor and residence of that person.
Common Confusion
*Hine fare* is sometimes encountered in proximity to related Domesday-era terms such as HINEGELD and HIDGILD, which sound similar and appear in overlapping source material but address different legal concepts. HINEGELD (also rendered HIDGILD) relates to a monetary payment or fine connected to the *hine* relationship, not the act of departure itself. Researchers should not treat these terms as interchangeable. Rapalje & Lawrence explicitly cross-references HINEGELD to HIDGILD, signaling that the payment-based concepts form a separate cluster from the status-and-movement concept captured in *hine fare*.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily of significance to researchers working in Anglo-Saxon and early Norman legal history, Domesday Book scholarship, or the history of villeinage and serfdom in England. Several practical research cautions apply:
First, the term is sparsely attested in legal dictionaries. Rapalje & Lawrence is one of the few standard American legal reference works to include it, and their entry is thin — a single sentence pointing to Domesday Book. Researchers should not expect robust dictionary support and will need to pursue primary sources directly.
Second, the Latin and Old English vocabulary of Domesday-era tenure is notoriously unstable. The word *hine* itself (Old English, a household servant or serf) appears in variant spellings across manuscripts. *Fare* in this context carries the archaic sense of going or departure, not payment or fare in any commercial sense. Misreading the component words through a modern lens is a genuine trap.
Third, the legal consequence of *hine fare* — what it meant for a lord when a servant departed, whether redress was available, and how departure interacted with the villein's status — is not resolved by dictionary definition alone. It connects to the broader legal framework governing bound labor, including questions of pursuit, recapture, and the lord's remedies, all of which require engagement with primary Domesday scholarship and secondary works on manorial law.
Fourth, researchers working in American legal history will encounter this term only in historical dictionary form; it has no continuing relevance in American or modern English law. Its appearance in a source should immediately signal that the surrounding material is either antiquarian in character or is tracing the deep historical roots of master-servant doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the sole entry among standard legal dictionaries consulted. Their definition is compressed to the point of terseness: "The loss or departure of a servant from his master," with a single citation to Domesday Book and an immediate cross-reference to HINEGELD/HIDGILD. The entry does no analytical work beyond identification.
No entry for *hine fare* appears in standard competitors such as Black's or Bouvier's, which reflects the term's narrow historical application and its limited relevance to the American common law tradition that those dictionaries primarily served. The Rapalje & Lawrence inclusion is notable precisely because that dictionary was designed to address terms of historical and English legal origin that practitioners might encounter in older authorities.
The Domesday Book citation is the natural primary source anchor for this term, but Rapalje & Lawrence do not specify a passage or folio, leaving the researcher to pursue that inquiry independently through Domesday scholarship.
Jurisdictional Note
*Hine fare* has no operative legal meaning in any modern jurisdiction. It belongs exclusively to the history of English law in the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods, approximately the ninth through eleventh centuries. No American jurisdiction has ever applied the term in a legal proceeding.