TO LANGE AND TO BRED

Definition

A Saxon or Old English phrase appearing in Bracton's *De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae*, used in connection with the presentment of Englishry. The phrase is of obscure meaning and survives primarily as a fragment within a single passage of Bracton's text, where it appears to describe one of the customary modes by which Englishry was presented before coroners in certain counties. Because the surrounding passage is incomplete as commonly reproduced in secondary sources, the precise legal operation of the phrase has not been definitively established. It is understood to relate to the sex or lineage classification of persons for purposes of the Englishry presentment — the procedural requirement under the murdrum fine system to prove that a slain person was English rather than Norman, thereby avoiding the collective penalty imposed on the hundred.

Why It Matters in Research

This term is a navigational dead end for most purposes — it appears in only one known passage in Bracton and is not independently defined in the standard historical dictionaries. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a terminus pointing back to the primary Bracton text rather than as a freestanding legal concept. The critical research move is to consult the full Bracton passage in context, as Burrill's entry reproduces only a fragment and breaks off before completing the relevant sentence. The phrase matters chiefly as evidence of the diversity of local customs governing Englishry presentment. Bracton's passage makes clear that practice varied by county (*secundum diversas consuetudines comitatuum*), and to lange and to bred appears to identify one such local variant — likely relating to whether presentment was made through male or female kin, or through kin of both sexes. Researchers working on the murdrum fine, hundred liability, or the operation of Englishry in early English law should treat this phrase as a marker of that local variation rather than a term carrying a uniform technical definition. Because the phrase is Saxon in origin and embedded in Latin legal prose, it also belongs to the class of transitional vocabulary that marks Bracton's text as a bridge between Anglo-Saxon customary practice and systematized common law. Researchers in Anglo-Norman legal history will find it useful as an example of how pre-Conquest terminology persisted in formal legal writing well into the thirteenth century.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only major historical legal dictionary to record this phrase, and even there the treatment is notably thin. Burrill acknowledges that the meaning is "very obscure" and offers no independent gloss, presenting the phrase entirely through the Bracton quotation. The entry breaks off mid-passage, which is itself informative: it suggests that Burrill either found the text too fragmentary to synthesize or that the available edition of Bracton did not yield a clean resolution. No entry for this phrase appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or Black's Law Dictionary. This absence is consistent with a phrase that never acquired independent circulation as a legal term of art — it remained embedded in a single source and was never extracted into general legal usage. The Bracton passage itself, as reproduced by Burrill, runs: *Et sciendum quod statim in ipsa inquisitione, et coram coronatoribus, præsentatur Englischeria, sed diversimodè tamen, secundum diversas consuetudines comitatuum. In quibusdam vero comitatibus, presentatur Englischeria, sive mortuus fuerit masculus sive fæmina, per duos masculos* — at which point the relevant phrase would have followed, completing the description of the presentment procedure. The Latin context (*sive mortuus fuerit masculus sive fæmina* — whether the deceased was male or female) suggests that to lange and to bred may correspond roughly to distinctions of sex or kinship line in the presentment requirement, though this remains interpretive.

Jurisdictional Note

This phrase belongs entirely to early English law and has no counterpart in American or modern Commonwealth legal systems. Its relevance is confined to the period of the murdrum fine and Englishry presentment, practices that had effectively disappeared by the late medieval period.

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