Definition
Hinefare is an obsolete term of old English law denoting the loss or departure of a servant from his master — that is, the act or fact of a servant leaving, whether voluntarily or otherwise, to the detriment of the household or lord to whom service was owed. The term appears in Domesday Book and belongs to the legal vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods, when the relationship between lord and servant carried enforceable legal obligations and the departure of a laborer or household servant could constitute a cognizable wrong or recordable event with economic and tenurial significance.
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Common Language
Hinefare is pure legal and historical jargon with no meaningful counterpart in modern or historical common usage. COMMON LANGUAGE section omitted.
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Why It Matters in Research
Hinefare is encountered almost exclusively in Domesday scholarship and in research touching on Anglo-Saxon and early Norman legal customs governing lordship, villeinage, and labor obligations. Researchers should be aware of several navigational points.
First, the term's primary source is Domesday Book itself. It does not appear in mainstream medieval common law treatises such as Bracton or Glanvill with any regularity, and its practical legal life was effectively confined to the pre-Conquest and immediately post-Conquest period. A researcher finding the term in secondary literature should treat it as a pointer back to Domesday records and Anglo-Saxon dooms rather than to later common law development.
Second, the concept behind hinefare connects to a broader cluster of Anglo-Saxon terms governing the servile and semi-servile classes — including the hine (the household servant or gebur) — and the legal consequences of their movement or loss. Understanding hinefare requires familiarity with the Anglo-Saxon social hierarchy of the hine, the geneat, and the theow, terms that are themselves subject to scholarly debate about their precise legal status.
Third, do not conflate this term with later medieval concepts of villeinage, serfdom, or the legal disabilities of the villein under common law. Hinefare belongs to an earlier and structurally distinct legal world. Projecting common law categories backward onto it produces anachronism.
Fourth, the corpus researcher will find that neither edition of Black's Law Dictionary expands meaningfully beyond the Domesday citation, which signals that the term had no significant reception in Anglo-American common law after the Conquest. It is a terminus, not a source for ongoing doctrinal development.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary provide identical substantive content: hinefare is defined as "the loss or departure of a servant from his master," with Domesday cited as the authority. The second edition adds the framing phrase "In old English law," confirming the term's status as historical curiosity rather than living doctrine.
Neither edition elaborates on the mechanics of what hinefare entailed — whether it triggered a penalty, a right of pursuit, a fine payable to the lord, or simply a recorded fact — and neither engages with the Anglo-Saxon social context necessary to interpret the term fully. The historical dictionaries are consistent with each other but thin. Researchers requiring substantive treatment of hinefare's legal meaning must look beyond Black's to Domesday scholarship and works on Anglo-Saxon law such as those of Liebermann or Maitland and Pollock's History of English Law.
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Jurisdictional Note
Hinefare has no jurisdictional variation in the modern sense. It belongs exclusively to the legal world of pre- and immediately post-Conquest England and has no recognized equivalent in Scots law, Irish law, or any American legal tradition.
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