I wish I had had a etymological dictionary when I was in school. Dictionaries that only give you the spelling and definitions leave out so much. The roots and relatives of words colour their meaning.
Fraught is related to freight and the German verb frachten. It does seem to have Germanic rather than Romance roots.
The dict.org definitions come with a highly relevant example: words fraught with meaning
. It really conveys the sense of being burdened or laden and heavy.
By the way, there is a site that really does a word a day. I'm just stealing the idea for today.