Definition
In old English law, to wall or enclose a piece of land; also, to repair or maintain an existing wall. The term appears in medieval Latin legal texts to describe the act of enclosing land with a physical boundary, whether a wall, ditch, or hedge. The gloss "wallatur fossato vel haid" — it is enclosed with a ditch or with a hedge — confirms that the term extended beyond literal masonry to encompass any act of securing land within a defined enclosure.
Why It Matters in Research
WALLARE is a term of medieval Latin legal usage and will appear almost exclusively in early English legal texts, year books, custumals, and related documentary sources from the feudal period. Researchers working in Anglo-Norman or Latin legal manuscripts should note that the term carries dual significance: it denotes both the act of initial enclosure and the ongoing obligation to maintain that enclosure. This distinction matters in historical property and tenure research because the duty to wall or repair a wall could be a condition attached to landholding — a failure to perform could have consequences under local custom or tenure obligation.
The primary sources cited — Somner's Gavelkind and Fleta — situate this term squarely within the literature of customary land tenure and estate management. Fleta, the late thirteenth-century legal treatise, is the more authoritative of the two for understanding how obligations of enclosure were conceived in legal practice. Researchers consulting Fleta should work from a scholarly edition with Latin text and translation, as the term appears in a technical agricultural and estate-management context. Somner's Gavelkind is a seventeenth-century treatment of Kentish custom and will be relevant primarily to researchers investigating tenure and land use in Kent specifically.
Because WALLARE is a Latinized form of a vernacular concept, researchers may encounter equivalent terms in Anglo-Norman or Middle English sources — forms like "walling," "enclosure," or words rooted in the hedge-and-ditch vocabulary of common-field agriculture — without recognizing the connection. Cross-referencing enclosure-related terminology in the corpus is advisable when tracing land boundary obligations through time.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the principal historical dictionary source for this term, and his entry is brief but precise. He correctly identifies the dual meaning — repair or maintenance of a wall on one hand, enclosure more broadly on the other — and grounds the definition in the two primary textual citations. The citation to Fleta lib. 5, c. 9, § 16 is particularly useful because Fleta is a systematic legal treatise, not merely a glossary, meaning the term appears in an operational legal context rather than a definitional one alone.
No other dictionary in the standard historical shelf — Cowell, Jacob, Tomlin, Bouvier — appears to have treated WALLARE as a standalone entry, which reflects both the term's obscurity and its confinement to a narrow stratum of Latin legal usage. Burrill's inclusion of it reflects his broader attention to Latin and Anglo-Norman terms drawn from the early common law sources. Researchers should not expect to find amplifying definitions elsewhere in the standard law dictionary tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
WALLARE is a term of English legal history with no modern jurisdictional footprint. Its relevance is confined to historical research into medieval English land tenure, estate obligations, and enclosure practices, primarily in the period before the consolidation of common law doctrine displaced Latin pleading and Latin legal terminology.