Definition
An obsolete term from old English law referring to the finest grade of white bread. The word appears in historical legal records and glossaries as a commodity term, identifying a superior quality of bread formerly known as "cocked bread." It has no operative legal meaning in modern practice.
Why It Matters in Research
IFUNGIA is the kind of term a researcher encounters in medieval English legal records, manorial accounts, or early treatises and finds essentially nowhere else. Its significance is narrow but specific: it appears as a commodity classification in contexts involving provisioning obligations, feudal renders, market regulations, or ecclesiastical hospitality duties, where the grade of bread owed or supplied carried legal or customary significance.
Researchers working in early English legal history should be aware that bread grades — including IFUNGIA, wastel, simnel, and others — were regulated commodities. The Assize of Bread, a recurring feature of English law from the medieval period, fixed the price, weight, and quality of bread according to the price of grain. Identifying the grade of bread in a historical document is not trivial: the grade determines which regulatory framework applied and what the corresponding legal obligation or penalty would have been.
The term is unlikely to appear in post-medieval sources. If it surfaces in a document, that document is almost certainly of medieval or early modern English origin. The secondary descriptor "cocked bread" — the term's former common name — may appear in older manorial or household records where IFUNGIA itself does not, so researchers should cross-reference both forms when searching manuscript sources.
All four source dictionaries trace the term to Blount — Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary (1670) — which is the originating authority for this entry across the legal dictionary tradition. Researchers who need primary support for the term should go directly to Blount rather than treating the dictionary entries as independent confirmation; they are not. Each entry is a restatement of the same single source.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in complete agreement: IFUNGIA means the finest white bread, formerly called cocked bread, and the authority is Blount. There is no variation, no elaboration, and no dissent across Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier's. This uniformity is itself informative — it confirms that no independent legal usage was located by any of these compilers. The term was preserved in the dictionary tradition as a matter of historical completeness, not because it was encountered in active legal practice at the time of compilation.
Bouvier's entry is notable for what follows immediately after IFUNGIA: entries for IGLISE (a church) and IGNIS JUDICIUM (trial by fire), which places the term in the company of other archaic Anglo-Norman and Latin terms assembled for the same reason — historical record, not practical guidance.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any context for how IFUNGIA was used in actual legal instruments, what obligations it might have quantified, or how it related to the Assize of Bread framework. Researchers requiring that context must go beyond the dictionary tradition to historical secondary sources on medieval English food regulation and manorial law.
Jurisdictional Note
IFUNGIA is specific to the old English legal tradition. It has no recognized meaning in Scots law, civil law systems, or American law.