Definition
In old English law, prender de baron (Law French: "a taking of husband") referred to a woman's act of remarriage after the death of her husband. The term carried specific procedural significance: a widow's remarriage could be pleaded as an exception to disable her from prosecuting an appeal of murder against the person accused of killing her former husband. The logic was that by taking a new husband, the widow had, in the law's view, forfeited or abandoned her personal standing to pursue the appeal on behalf of the slain spouse.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially a dead artifact of medieval English criminal procedure and will surface only in sources dealing with the appeal of murder — a private criminal action that survived in English common law long after it had ceased to have practical importance, formally abolished only by statute in 1819. Researchers encountering prender de baron in historical records or treatises should situate it within that narrow procedural context.
Two research traps are worth flagging. First, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry introduces a different sense of the term — that a husband's prerogatives included "the profits" of the wife — which appears to confuse or conflate prender de baron with the broader common-law doctrine of coverture and the husband's right to receive his wife's property and earnings. That usage does not appear in the other major dictionaries and should be treated with caution; it may reflect Cowell's gloss rather than the term's operative legal meaning in practice.
Second, because the term is Law French and appears in very old pleading contexts, researchers working with pre-nineteenth-century English criminal records should be alert to variant spellings and abbreviations. The controlling authority cited consistently across Black's and Burrill is Staundforde's Plees del Coron (lib. 3, c. 59), a sixteenth-century treatise on English criminal law, which is the appropriate primary reference if deeper investigation is needed.
The term has no meaningful life in American law. It will not appear in American case law or statutes except as an antiquarian reference.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in close agreement, presenting nearly identical definitions and citing the same authority — Staundforde's Plees del Coron — as the source. All three treat the term as a procedural exception in the appeal of murder, grounded in the widow's remarriage.
Rapalje & Lawrence diverges. Their entry shifts the frame from criminal procedure to marital property, suggesting the term relates to a husband's entitlement to a wife's profits. This may reflect a secondary or vernacular use of the phrase, or it may be an error drawing on Cowell's Interpreter, which is cited in that entry. Cowell's seventeenth-century legal glossary occasionally conflated distinct concepts, and that influence may explain the divergence. The Black's and Burrill's treatment, grounded in Staundforde's Plees del Coron, is the more legally specific and procedurally grounded account, and should be preferred.
What none of the historical dictionaries adequately explain is the underlying rationale: why remarriage should extinguish the right to pursue an appeal. The implied logic is that the appeal of murder was understood partly as a personal grievance rooted in the matrimonial bond, and that taking a new husband either transferred that interest or signaled its relinquishment. This is consistent with the general medieval common-law treatment of the appeal as quasi-personal rather than purely public.
Jurisdictional Note
Prender de baron is exclusively a term of English common law with no American common-law reception. The appeal of murder, to which this term was procedurally attached, was never adopted as a functional part of American criminal practice.