Definition
An archaic Law French preposition meaning "in spite of" or "against the will of." Used in older legal texts and pleadings to signal that an act was done contrary to someone's wishes or consent — that is, without permission and over opposition. It functions as an intensifier of involuntariness, appearing most often in contexts involving wrongful taking or entry against the objection of the possessor.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "In spite of, notwithstanding."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To defy." Marked as obsolete.
The common and legal meanings are close but not identical. In ordinary historical usage, maugre carried a sense of active defiance or contempt. In legal usage, the term is more precise: it signals an act done against another's will, which is a technical element in distinguishing lawful from unlawful possession or entry. A researcher encountering the word in a legal document should read it as a term of art emphasizing the absence of consent, not merely a literary flourish for "despite."
Common Confusion
Maugre appears in variant spellings — malgre, malgré, and mal gree — across the historical sources. These are the same term in slightly different orthographic forms, reflecting inconsistent transcription of Law French into English legal records. Burrill's cross-references all three. Researchers searching a single spelling in digitized sources may miss occurrences under variant forms.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term that belongs entirely to the historical stratum of the Law Mind corpus. It will not appear in modern statutes, modern case law, or contemporary legal writing. Its presence in a document is itself a dating signal: texts using maugre without quotation or explanation were almost certainly written before the eighteenth century, or are deliberate archaisms in later scholarly commentary on early English law.
The primary research risk is misreading or skipping the word in transcribed Year Book passages, early equity records, or treatise excerpts. In context, it almost always modifies a description of entry, taking, or holding — "he entered maugre the tenant" means he entered against the tenant's will, which is the difference between a lawful and a trespassory act. Missing the word changes the legal meaning of the passage.
Researchers working with Littleton's Tenures — the source cited by both Black's editions and Burrill — will encounter maugre in discussions of disseisin and forcible entry. The Coke on Littleton commentary expands on such passages, and the same word appears in Coke's rendering. Cross-checking variant spellings is essential when working with any pre-1700 English legal source in the corpus.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill are in complete agreement: all three define the term identically as "in spite of; against the will of" and pin it to Littleton section 672. No source adds substantive interpretation beyond the citation anchor. The second edition of Black's carries what appears to be a typographical artifact — text from an unrelated "matrons" entry immediately precedes the maugre definition — a reminder that nineteenth-century legal dictionaries were typeset under conditions that occasionally garbled adjacent entries.
Burrill adds value by cross-referencing malgre and mal gree, which Black's omits. For corpus researchers, Burrill's cross-references are the more useful guide to variant-form searching.
None of the historical dictionaries explain the term's legal function in depth. They record the translation but do not explain why the concept mattered — that involuntariness was often a dispositive element in distinguishing tortious from non-tortious acts in early common law property and trespass doctrine.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Disseisin; Forcible Entry; Law French in the Common Law Tradition