Definition
Laughe is an archaic English spelling variant, not a legal term of art. It does not appear to carry independent legal meaning. The historical dictionary entries indexed under this heading in Law Mind's source dictionaries redirect to, or appear alongside, the entry for Frank-pledge — suggesting that "laughe" was likely a paleographic or indexing artifact in the original manuscripts or compiled sources rather than a freestanding legal concept. Researchers encountering "laughe" in historical legal documents should treat it as a probable transcription variant rather than a term with substantive legal content of its own.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Archaic spelling of "laugh."
Historical common usage: No distinct entry in Webster's 1913; the standard form "laugh" carried its ordinary meaning of expressing amusement vocally.
Editorial note: The gap here is not between common and legal meaning in the traditional sense, but between a common-language relic spelling and a legal index entry that appears to have been miscaptured or misattributed in compiled dictionaries. A researcher seeing "laughe" in a legal source is almost certainly looking at either a scribal spelling variant or a cataloguing error — not an independently meaningful legal term.
Common Confusion
The source dictionaries indexed under "Laughe" actually contain entries for Frank-pledge (citing 2 Reeves, History of English Law, 17) and, in Bouvier's, for Launcegay or Laucegay (a prohibited spear or javelin under 7 Ric. II, c. 13). Neither of these has any relationship to the word "laughe." Researchers should not assume a substantive connection between the headword as it appears in the index and the legal content found under it. This is a known hazard when working with compiled or digitized historical dictionaries where headwords were sometimes garbled in transcription or typesetting.
Why It Matters in Research
This entry is a navigation warning, not a substantive resource. If you have arrived here because you encountered "laughe" in a historical legal text, the most productive path forward is to:
1. Check whether the surrounding manuscript or printed context suggests a scribal abbreviation, dialectal spelling, or transcription error pointing to a different term entirely.
2. Consider whether the document you are reading may be using a Middle or Early Modern English spelling convention, in which case the word likely means nothing more than the common verb "laugh" and carries no legal significance.
3. Do not assume the Law Mind source dictionaries define "laughe" as a legal term — the entries catalogued here belong to Frank-pledge and Launcegay, and their appearance under this headword reflects an indexing artifact in the compiled sources.
The broader lesson for corpus researchers: historical legal dictionaries, particularly compiled and digitized editions, frequently contain headword attribution errors. Content that appears under one headword may belong to an adjacent entry. Cross-referencing against Reeves's History of English Law (the treatise actually cited in these entries) will yield more reliable results than relying on the headword index alone.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary agree in presenting no substantive legal definition under this heading — what appears in all three source entries is content belonging to Frank-pledge, with Bouvier's adding the Launcegay entry. None of the historical dictionaries treats "laughe" as a term requiring definition. The consistent redirect to Frank-pledge across editions suggests the headword error was carried forward through successive compilations without correction, a pattern common in nineteenth-century legal dictionary production where entries were reprinted from earlier editions with minimal editorial review.
Bouvier's citation to 7 Ric. II, c. 13 for the prohibition on the launcegay and the shared citation to 2 Reeves, History of English Law, at page 17 for Frank-pledge are the substantive legal references actually embedded in these entries. Researchers interested in either topic should follow those citations directly.