Definition
Mal gree is a Law French phrase meaning "against the will" or "without the consent." It appears in early English legal texts to signal that an act was done over the objection or without the agreement of a named party — most commonly a tenant or possessor of land. The phrase functions as a term of negation, qualifying an action or transfer to indicate the absence of voluntary assent.
The phrase is also encountered in the contracted form "malgre" and the later anglicized variant "maugre," both carrying the same force. Burrill records the full phrase "mal gree le tenant" — without the consent of the tenant — drawn from Britton, an early Anglo-Norman legal treatise, illustrating the phrase's most common operative context: describing dispossession or entry upon land made against the will of the occupant.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard entry. The term is archaic and does not appear in modern general English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered as a discrete term. The related word "maugre" appears as an archaic preposition meaning "in spite of" or "notwithstanding," surviving in literary use into the early modern period.
Editorial note: Mal gree is pure legal French with no meaningful presence in modern common English. Its closest literary relative, "maugre," carried a broader rhetorical sense in non-legal writing — expressing defiance or indifference to opposition rather than the precise legal concept of absent consent. Researchers should not assume the literary usage maps cleanly onto the technical legal meaning.
Common Confusion
Mal gree, malgre, and maugre are three forms of the same concept and are sometimes treated as distinct terms in older indices and glossaries. They are not distinct: malgre is the contracted form of mal gree, and maugre is the later anglicized variant. Both Black's editions and Burrill treat them as a family, cross-referencing each to the others. When searching historical sources, researchers should check all three spellings. Confusion with "gree" (meaning consent or goodwill, the positive counterpart) is also possible; Burrill explicitly cross-references "See Gree," pointing to the conceptual pair.
Why It Matters in Research
Mal gree is primarily a research term rather than an operative one — you are far more likely to encounter it while reading a medieval or early modern English legal text than to find it in a modern pleading or statute. Its value to corpus researchers is navigational.
First, spelling instability is the central trap. Historical manuscripts and printed law books use mal gree, malgre, and maugre interchangeably and inconsistently. A full-text search on any single spelling will miss instances using the others. Any research into early property law, disseisin, or forcible entry in Anglo-Norman sources should include all three variants in the search string.
Second, the phrase marks a substantive legal condition. When mal gree appears in a source, it signals that the legal question turns on consent — specifically its absence. This connects to the medieval law of novel disseisin, forcible entry, and related real property actions where the manner of dispossession (with or without the tenant's consent) determined the available remedy. Understanding mal gree therefore unlocks a cluster of related doctrines.
Third, the phrase is effectively extinct in living legal language. Modern legal instruments accomplish the same function through express language of objection, nonconsent, or involuntariness. A researcher encountering the phrase in a historical document should treat it as a period marker as well as a substantive signal.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's first and second editions are essentially identical on this term, both defining it as "against the will; without the consent" and flagging the contracted and anglicized variants. Neither edition elaborates on operative context or provides a case illustration.
Burrill adds the most substantive gloss. By supplying the phrase "mal gree le tenant" with a citation to Britton (c. 41), Burrill grounds the term in an actual legal context — the tenant's nonconsent to an entry or transfer — and connects it to the positive counterpart "gree" (consent). This makes Burrill the more useful source for understanding how the term functioned in practice rather than merely what it translates to.
None of the historical dictionaries address the term's extinction from active legal usage or its relationship to the substantive doctrines (disseisin, forcible entry) where it most frequently appears. Researchers treating the dictionary definitions as complete will miss this doctrinal context entirely.
Jurisdictional Note
Mal gree is specific to the Anglo-Norman legal tradition and appears almost exclusively in English common law sources predating the eighteenth century. It has no recognized role in American statutory or case law and does not appear as a live term in any modern common law jurisdiction.