Definition
An obsolete Law French term meaning to fish, or the act of fishing. Derived from the Latin piscare. Appears in early English legal records and treatises primarily in compound constructions. The most significant such construction is droit de pescher, meaning the right to fish — a recognized property right in medieval and early modern English law governing access to fisheries. The related noun form, pescherie (also spelled peskerye), denotes a fishery: a specific water, stretch of river, or designated location in which a right to fish was held.
These terms belong to the vocabulary of riparian and common rights as they were understood in medieval English law, when Law French remained the operative language of the courts and legal instruments.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering pescher or its derivatives in historical English legal documents — particularly in plea rolls, charters, manorial records, or early treatises — should understand that the term signals a formal property right, not merely a physical activity. A droit de pescher was a cognizable legal interest that could be granted, conveyed, disputed, and adjudicated. Its appearance in a source document typically indicates a rights claim, not mere description of fishing activity.
The noun form pescherie (peskerye) corresponds to the English term fishery, but the two terms do not map perfectly across all historical periods. Fishery as an English legal concept carries a developed taxonomy — free fishery, common of fishery, several fishery, fishery in gross — that does not always appear explicitly in earlier Law French sources using pescherie. Researchers should not assume that a reference to pescherie implies a particular subtype of fishery right without additional contextual evidence.
Both terms are essentially absent from post-medieval legal writing. By the time English legal treatises were written in English rather than Law French, these terms had been displaced by their English equivalents. Their appearance in sources is therefore a strong dating signal: primary sources using pescher or pescherie are almost certainly pre-seventeenth century in origin or are later antiquarian compilations citing earlier material.
Brittain's Britton — cited in Burrill as Britt. c. 63 — is the primary treatise source for these terms. Britton is a late thirteenth-century English legal treatise written in Law French and attributed to John le Breton. It is a key source for understanding royal and feudal rights over land and water in the Edwardian period. Researchers consulting Britton should be aware that the chapter organization and numbering vary across editions and manuscripts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantial treatment of these terms among the historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill traces pescher to the Latin piscare, provides the translation "to fish," and notes its appearance in Britton c. 63. He treats pescherie as the direct noun derivative, equating it with fishery and citing both Britton and Kelham's dictionary of Norman French legal terms.
Burrill's entry is functional but thin. It identifies the terms, supplies their meanings, and anchors them to their sources — but offers no analysis of how the right was defined, what limits applied to it, or how it related to other water rights. For substantive legal content, researchers must go to Britton itself and to English legal history sources treating riparian rights in the medieval period. Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary, which cover fishery rights under that English heading, provide the doctrinal framework that Burrill's entry for pescher does not.
Jurisdictional Note
These terms are specific to the English legal tradition. They do not appear in Scots, Irish, or Continental legal sources in the same technical sense. Post-colonial American law absorbed English riparian doctrine but did so through English-language sources; pescher and pescherie have no independent presence in American legal history.