Definition
A term from old European law meaning a wound. The word appears in early medieval legal texts and glossaries as a designation for a bodily wound, likely in the context of injury-based legal proceedings, compensation schemes, or pleas involving physical harm to a person.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *maoulare* will find it almost exclusively in highly archaic sources — medieval European legal compilations, glossaries of Latin and hybrid vernacular legal terms, or early English legal dictionaries drawing on continental and Anglo-Saxon materials. The term has no operative role in modern law and no surviving statutory or common law lineage in current Anglo-American practice.
The primary research trap is one of identification: the word is sufficiently obscure that it may appear without translation in a primary source, leaving a researcher uncertain whether it refers to a person, an act, a document, or a physical condition. Black's attribution to Spelman — Sir Henry Spelman's *Glossarium Archaiologicum* — is the authoritative pointer. Researchers who cannot locate the term elsewhere should consult Spelman's glossary directly, as that work is the likely original source for its appearance in later legal dictionaries.
Because the term sits at the intersection of Roman law vocabulary, ecclesiastical Latin, and early Germanic legal custom, it may surface in sources dealing with *bot* and *wer* (Anglo-Saxon compensation for injury and death), early Norman legal procedure, or continental Frankish law. Researchers working in any of these areas should be alert to the term as a potential cognate or synonym for wound-related entries in parallel sources.
The term does not appear in later editions of Black's Law Dictionary in common use today, and its absence from most secondary legal reference works means that Black's 2nd edition and Spelman's glossary are effectively the ceiling of available dictionary support in the Law Mind corpus.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the entirety of the available dictionary record for this term: "In old European law. wound. Spelman." The entry is minimal by design — a direct gloss with a source attribution, the standard form for archaic terms carried forward into early American legal dictionaries more for completeness than for practical utility.
The attribution to Spelman is significant. Sir Henry Spelman (c. 1563–1641) compiled the *Glossarium Archaiologicum*, one of the most comprehensive early glossaries of medieval English and European legal terminology. His work drew on Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Latin, and continental Germanic sources, and it remains a foundational reference for pre-common-law terminology. Researchers should treat the Spelman citation not merely as a bibliographic courtesy but as a directional instruction: the full context of *maoulare* — including any variants, related terms, or legal consequences attached to the concept of wounding — will be found there rather than in the dictionary entry itself.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus is recorded as containing an entry for this term. Its absence from sources like Bouvier's Law Dictionary or Tomlin's Law Dictionary is consistent with its status as a purely archaic Continental or early medieval term without direct English common law application.