Definition
An archaic Law French term appearing in early English and Anglo-Norman legal sources. "Hoste" carries two related but distinct senses in historical legal usage:
1. Host or entertainer: A person who harbors, lodges, or receives another into their dwelling or establishment.
2. Guest: The person received or harbored by the host.
The term appears most characteristically in the context of legal responsibility — specifically, the obligation of a host to answer (i.e., be held legally accountable) for the conduct, debts, or actions of guests harbored in their home. Burrill cites Britton's formulation: that every person shall answer for the guest whom he shall have harbored. This reflects an early common law principle of host liability grounded in the act of harboring itself, not merely in contractual or commercial relationship.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Host" means a person who receives or entertains guests; also a broadcaster, emcee, or the organism harboring a parasite. "Guest" means a person invited to visit or stay.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Host" — one who entertains a guest; also an army or multitude. "Guest" — a visitor entertained in one's house without pay, or a lodger at an inn.
The legal gap is structural, not semantic. In ordinary usage, the host-guest relationship carries social or hospitality connotations but imposes no legal duty. In the historical legal sense captured by "hoste," the act of harboring created affirmative legal liability — the host was answerable for the harbored person. That duty-creating dimension is entirely absent from the modern common meaning.
Common Confusion
Because "hoste" can denote either the host or the guest depending on context, researchers working in Anglo-Norman or early Middle English legal texts must read the surrounding passage carefully. The phrase cited by Burrill — "chescun respoyne pur son hoste" — uses "hoste" to mean "guest," while the framing subject ("every one") is implicitly the host. The term does not reliably anchor to one role or the other without context.
Why It Matters in Research
"Hoste" is a terminal-vocabulary term — it rarely appears outside of Law French sources and early treatises such as Britton. Researchers will not encounter it in modern statutes, case reporters, or secondary sources under this spelling. Its value is documentary: it marks the conceptual origin of host liability doctrine in English law.
The harboring-equals-accountability principle embedded in the Britton passage is historically significant because it precedes the modern tort framework for social host liability by centuries. Researchers tracing the doctrinal lineage of innkeeper liability, social host liability, or dram shop liability should treat "hoste" as an upstream source concept. The duty to answer for a harbored guest — imposed simply by reason of the harboring — is a precursor to later statutory and common law frameworks that impose liability on those who enable harm by providing shelter, alcohol, or other facilitation to a third party who then causes injury.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should connect this term forward to modern social host liability doctrine. The structural logic — voluntary act of harboring creates legal exposure — survives in attenuated form in contemporary tort law, though the mechanism of liability has shifted dramatically from strict accountability to negligence-based and often statute-dependent frameworks.
Be alert to spelling variation in manuscript and early print sources: "hoste," "hostes," "oste," and related forms all appear. Kelham's glossary of Norman French legal terms (cited by Burrill) is the primary reference tool for variant forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary source here, and his entry is characteristically economical: a translation, a citation to Kelham, and a direct quotation from Britton. The Britton passage is genuinely instructive — it is one of the earliest explicit statements in English legal literature that harboring creates personal accountability for the harbored party.
No other Law Mind shelf source addresses "hoste" as a standalone term. The absence reflects the term's obsolescence rather than any gap in historical scholarship. By the time English legal dictionaries were systematized in the early modern period, the Law French vocabulary had largely been absorbed into English legal terminology or discarded, and "hoste" had no direct successor term requiring separate treatment.
What historical sources collectively miss is the downstream trajectory: the principle stated in Britton did not disappear but was redistributed across innkeeper law, master-servant doctrine, and eventually negligence-based host liability. No single historical dictionary entry traces that migration.
Jurisdictional Note
As a Law French term of historical origin, "hoste" has no active jurisdictional application in any modern legal system. The liability principle it represents, however, varies significantly by jurisdiction in its contemporary form. Social host liability — the modern analogue — is recognized in some U.S. states and Canadian provinces but rejected or limited in others, and is typically governed by statute rather than common law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia — Social Host Liability (Torts_204)