Definition
An archaic legal term meaning to bereave, take away, or rob. The word appears in early English legal texts as a verb denoting the act of forcibly depriving another of something — whether property, rights, or persons. It has no meaningful place in modern legal usage and survives only in historical glossaries and antiquarian legal scholarship.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recognized as a current English word.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term was archaic even by the nineteenth century.
Editorial note: Because the word carries no live meaning in common English, researchers encountering it should treat it as a pure relic of early legal Latin-influenced English, requiring historical dictionary support rather than ordinary-language interpretation.
Common Confusion
REFARE should not be confused with REFARE's structural neighbor REFECTION, which Bouvier's appends immediately after the REFARE entry. Refection is a civil-law term of entirely different character, referring to reparation or the re-establishment of a building (Dig. 19.1.6.1). The proximity of the two entries in Bouvier's has occasionally caused readers to conflate them. They are unrelated in meaning, root, and legal application.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal manuscripts, ecclesiastical records, or antiquarian legal dictionaries may encounter REFARE in contexts involving deprivation of property or persons — situations that in modern law would be addressed through conversion, larceny, robbery, or wrongful taking doctrine. The word's practical significance is almost entirely paleographic and philological: understanding what the original drafter meant, not what legal rule applies today.
Several navigational cautions apply:
First, all four source dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus trace the definition to a single authority — Cowell, meaning John Cowell's Interpreter (1607). This unanimity signals that no independent verification existed even when Black's and Bouvier's were compiled. Researchers should treat the definition as Cowell's gloss, not as a term that appeared with frequency or consistent meaning across primary legal sources.
Second, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry contains an anomalous phrase — "is referred to chambers to be dealt with by the Cowell" — that appears to be a printing or transcription artifact. It does not reflect a substantive legal concept and should be disregarded. Researchers using digitized versions of Rapalje & Lawrence may encounter this corruption and should recognize it as a textual defect, not legal content.
Third, because the term maps roughly onto forcible deprivation, historical researchers working on questions of robbery, disseisin, or spoliation may find REFARE used in period sources where those modern concepts would now apply. Do not assume a precise doctrinal boundary from period usage — the term was descriptive rather than technical.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree entirely on the core definition: to bereave, take away, or rob. There is no divergence on substance. The exclusive citation to Cowell across all four dictionaries is itself the most important editorial fact: it confirms that none of the later compilers — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Rapalje & Lawrence — found independent primary legal authority for the term. They were each copying forward a single seventeenth-century gloss.
Bouvier's is the only dictionary to contextualize REFARE within a broader entry structure by immediately following it with REFECTION, which introduces Digest authority (Dig. 19.1.6.1) entirely absent from the REFARE entry. The contrast is instructive: where civil-law terms like REFECTION could be anchored in Roman sources, REFARE rests on nothing older than Cowell.
Black's first and second editions reproduce the definition word for word, offering no expansion, case application, or updated commentary. This verbatim reproduction across editions suggests the editors considered the term sufficiently settled (and sufficiently obsolete) to require no further treatment.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry corresponds directly to REFARE. Researchers may find relevant context under entries addressing early English property law, robbery and forcible taking, or the history of legal lexicography.