Definition
An archaic Anglo-Norman legal term meaning ransom — specifically, a payment made for the redemption of one's body and blood (flesh and life). The phrase faire rechat' du char et du saunk translates as "to make ransom of flesh and of blood," indicating a payment to secure personal liberty or avoid corporeal punishment, typically in the context of captivity or judicial peril. The term belongs to the feudal and early common law vocabulary of ransom and personal redemption.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Listed as an obsolete form of "recheat," a hunting signal blown on a horn to call hounds back.
Historical common usage: No relevant Webster's 1913 entry exists for this term.
Editorial note: The common-language survival of "rechate/recheat" points entirely toward the hunting horn signal — a meaning unrelated to the legal sense. A researcher encountering "rechate" in a historical legal manuscript should not assume any connection to the chase or to hunting law; the legal meaning is strictly one of ransom and personal redemption, drawn from a separate strand of Anglo-Norman usage.
Common Confusion
Rechate should not be confused with "recheat" as used in medieval hunting manuals and literary sources, where it denotes a specific horn call used in the hunt. The phonetic and orthographic overlap between the two terms is a genuine trap in manuscript research. Additionally, researchers should distinguish rechate from the broader feudal concept of ransom (rançon) more generally: rechate in its attested legal usage appears specifically tied to ransom of the person — flesh and blood — rather than ransom of property or goods.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is narrow, rare, and appears in a compressed slice of the Year Book period. Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the sole attested legal source in the Law Mind corpus is the Year Books of Edward II (Mich. 7 Edw. II), placing the term firmly in early fourteenth-century English legal practice. Researchers working in later Year Books or Plea Rolls should not expect the term to appear with any frequency, and its absence from later sources should not be read as evidence of irrelevance — it may simply reflect terminological displacement as Latin and later Law French vocabulary supplanted older forms.
Second, the orthographic variation between rechate, rechat', and recheat requires flexible search strategies in manuscript and printed Year Book sources. Abbreviated forms (rechat' with a suspension mark) are common in Year Book manuscripts and early print editions; failing to account for the abbreviation will cause the term to be missed in full-text searches.
Third, because the term sits at the intersection of ransom law, personal liberty, and early criminal or quasi-criminal procedure, it may surface in contexts that modern researchers would categorize under very different headings — prisoner redemption, amercement, or even early debt. Awareness of this contextual flexibility is essential when reading surrounding Year Book passages.
Fourth, the hunting-term false cognate (recheat) is not merely a modern confusion — medieval scribes and compilers were equally capable of conflating terms in similar orthographic registers. Any Year Book passage using rechat' or rechate should be read with attention to context before assuming either meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill is economical: he gives the Anglo-Norman French, a translation ("ransom"), and a direct quotation from the Year Books — faire rechat' du char et du saunk — with a precise citation to Michaelmas Term, 7 Edward II. This is useful as a pinpoint reference but the entry is essentially a gloss, offering no doctrinal analysis, no discussion of how the ransom operated procedurally, and no connection to surrounding Year Book context.
No entry appears in the other historical dictionaries of the Law Mind shelf. The absence from Tomlin, Bouvier, Black, or Jacob reflects the term's extreme archaism and its confinement to a narrow slice of early fourteenth-century Year Book practice. Burrill's coverage of Anglo-Norman terms is notably broader than contemporaneous American legal dictionaries, which accounts for why it alone preserves this entry.
What historical sources collectively miss: no source in the corpus addresses the mechanics of the ransom — who paid, to whom, under what circumstances, or how this personal redemption related to adjacent doctrines of mainprise, bail, or amercement. Researchers needing that doctrinal context must go directly to the Year Books and to secondary scholarship on early common law procedure.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is English in origin and confined to early common law sources. It has no American legal history and does not appear in any civil law or Scottish tradition. Research utility is limited to English medieval legal history.