Definition
An archaic Anglo-French legal term for a market — specifically, a formally authorized place or occasion of public trade and commerce. In medieval English law, the right to hold a market (marche) was a franchise granted by royal authority, giving the holder legal power to conduct supervised public buying and selling within a defined location and on specified days.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An administrative region in central Italy.
Historical common usage: No meaningful historical common English usage — the term was drawn directly from Law French and did not circulate in ordinary English.
The gap here is categorical. In modern English, "Marche" (or "the Marches") calls to mind a geographic borderland or an Italian region. In medieval English law, it was a term of commerce and franchise — a market in the technical legal sense — with no geographic meaning attached.
Common Confusion
Marche (market) should not be confused with the March or Marches in the sense of border territories (as in the Welsh Marches or Scottish Marches). These are entirely distinct legal and geographical concepts that happen to share a common orthographic root in Law French and Middle English. In historical sources, the proximity of these terms on the page or in an index can mislead researchers into treating them as related concepts. They are not. The market-sense of marche derives from a different etymological and legal lineage than the border-territory sense.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records, Year Books, or early statute compilations will encounter marche principally in the context of market franchises and the statutory regulation of markets. The Statute of Westminster I (1275) — referenced in Burrill's citation to Stat. Westm. 1, cc. 23 and 31 — addresses market regulation directly, including protections for established markets against unlawful competition from nearby markets. Britton (c. 2), also cited by Burrill, provides early common law framing for the legal nature of market rights.
The key research trap is terminological: Law French sources use marche for market in contexts where modern researchers expect "market," "fair," or "forum." Missing this equivalence can cause a researcher to misread a passage about trade regulation as something else entirely, or to fail to retrieve relevant records when searching by subject.
Additionally, because market franchises were property rights — descendible, grantable, and litigable — marche appears in property records, quo warranto proceedings, and charter documentation, not only in commercial law sources. A researcher following a market franchise dispute through the records will need to recognize the term across all these contexts.
The term is essentially obsolete in modern legal usage. No contemporary jurisdiction uses marche as a legal term of art. Its relevance is entirely historical.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal: "L. Fr. A market." He cites Britton and two chapters of the Statute of Westminster I without elaboration. This entry is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Law French terms — accurate identification and statutory anchor, but no doctrinal development. Researchers should not expect Burrill alone to explain the legal significance of market franchises; he is useful here only as a translation key and a pointer to primary sources.
No other dictionary in the Law Mind corpus provides an entry for marche in this sense. The term does not appear in later common law dictionaries because by the time those works were compiled, "market" had fully displaced the Law French form in legal writing.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs entirely to the medieval English common law tradition. It has no operative meaning in any modern jurisdiction. Researchers in Scottish, Irish, or continental European legal history should note that parallel terms existed in those traditions but may carry different doctrinal freight.