Definition
An Anglo-Norman (Law French) term meaning "to eat" or "eating." Maunger appears in historical legal sources primarily in compound phrases and procedural contexts rather than as a standalone legal concept. The most notable such phrase is *maunger des jurours* — literally "eating of jurors" — a term referencing the practice or allowance of feeding jurors during deliberations, a matter of procedural significance in early English jury practice.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard entry. The word is not current in modern English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term derives from Law French and did not pass into general English usage.
Editorial note: Maunger has no meaningful life outside legal and quasi-legal historical French. Researchers encountering it in English-language legal sources are dealing with a Law French survival, not an English word with a parallel common meaning. The gap here is not between legal and common meaning — it is between a living language and a dead one.
Why It Matters in Research
Maunger is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in early English Year Books and works drawing heavily on Law French sources, such as Spelman's glossaries and Britton. Its significance is narrow but specific: when it appears in procedural contexts, it often signals material about jury management practices in medieval English courts.
The phrase *maunger des jurours* cited by Burrill from Dyer 37b (French edition) points to real procedural history — courts in early English practice grappled with whether and how jurors could be fed, and at whose expense, during sequestration. Researchers working on the history of the jury, judicial administration, or court procedure will find this term as a data point in that larger inquiry.
Two navigational cautions apply. First, Burrill's entry runs maunger directly into adjacent headwords (MAUVEISE, etc.) without a clean break, a layout artifact common in nineteenth-century law dictionaries. Researchers scanning Burrill in facsimile or early digital form may misread the entry boundaries. Second, the cited Dyer reference is to the French edition of Dyer's Reports — not the standard English editions most commonly held in research collections — which may complicate verification.
Because maunger is Law French rather than Latin or English, keyword searches in Latin-indexed or English-only corpora will miss it. Searching variant spellings (manger, maungier) may surface additional instances in Year Book literature.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's is the primary shelf source treating maunger as a distinct headword. The entry is brief and somewhat compressed, defining the term by root meaning and pointing to Spelman and to Dyer for the compound phrase. Burrill does not elaborate on the procedural substance behind *maunger des jurours*, treating it as a vocabulary item rather than a doctrine.
Spelman's glossary, referenced by Burrill, is the deeper source for Law French terms of this vintage and would provide additional context for researchers who need to trace the term's usage across medieval sources. Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary do not appear to carry maunger as a standalone entry, which is consistent with the term's narrow procedural footprint.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any substantive account of what the practice of juror feeding meant for jury integrity, deliberation duration, or the economics of trial administration — questions that modern legal historians have addressed but that nineteenth-century lexicographers treated as outside their scope.
Jurisdictional Note
Maunger is a term of English legal history with no jurisdictional currency in modern American, Commonwealth, or civil law systems. Researchers encountering it are working in the domain of medieval and early modern English legal practice.