Definition
An unlawful game prohibited by English statute. Logating was one of several recreational pastimes banned under the Statute of 33 Henry VIII, chapter 9, an Act of Parliament enacted in 1541 that restricted common laborers, artificers, and servants from engaging in certain games on the grounds that such activities drew men away from archery practice and encouraged idleness and unlawful assembly. The precise nature of the game is not fully documented in surviving sources, but it is understood to have involved throwing or bowling with stones or logs — a pastime of the laboring classes — and was grouped with skittles, bowls, and similar popular games deemed socially and militarily undesirable by the Tudor state.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recognized as a current English word in standard modern dictionaries.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The word does not appear to have survived in popular usage past the early modern period.
The term has no meaningful presence in contemporary common language. Its appearance in legal dictionaries is essentially historical and archival — a record that the word once designated something legally cognizable rather than evidence of a living legal concept.
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Why It Matters in Research
Logating is a term a researcher will encounter only in historical legal dictionaries and in the context of Tudor-era regulatory legislation. It carries no active legal significance today and does not appear in modern statutory codes or case law.
For corpus researchers, the primary value is contextual: understanding logating situates the 1541 statute within a broader Tudor program of social regulation. The Statute of 33 Henry VIII, chapter 9 was part of a cluster of gaming laws designed to compel military readiness — specifically archery proficiency — among the laboring population. The statute prohibited not only logating but a range of games including bowls, quoits, and coiting. Researchers working on the history of gaming regulation, vagrancy law, sumptuary legislation, or Tudor social policy will find logating a useful index term for navigating that cluster.
The word also illustrates a recurring challenge in historical legal research: terms that appear in legal dictionaries because they once required legal definition, but whose underlying activity has been absorbed into broader categories (gaming, gambling, disorderly conduct) or simply vanished. When encountered in a primary source, do not assume the modern reader's intuition about the word's meaning is reliable — the game itself is obscure enough that the label conveys almost nothing without statutory context.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry appears to be truncated in available sources, suggesting this term was treated as minor even by nineteenth-century compilers.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's first edition, Black's second edition, and Rapalje & Lawrence — provide virtually identical and minimal entries, each pointing to 33 Henry VIII, chapter 9 as the sole authority. There is no substantive divergence among the sources, and none attempts further description of the game itself. This unanimity reflects the limits of the available historical record rather than settled consensus about the term's meaning.
What the historical dictionaries miss: none of the entries situates logating within the broader statutory context or explains why the 1541 Act was passed. The connection to archery policy and Tudor military preparedness is absent from all three. A researcher relying solely on these dictionary entries would know only that the game was prohibited, not why or in what company of other prohibited activities.
The brevity of these entries is itself informative. By the time Black's first appeared in 1891, logating had been a dead letter for roughly 350 years. The dictionaries preserved it as a matter of legal completeness, not practical utility.
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Jurisdictional Note
Logating as a legal category never had application in American law. The 1541 statute was English domestic legislation with no colonial reception, and no American jurisdiction enacted equivalent prohibitions using this term. Research interest is confined to English legal history.
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