Definition
A tort (used here in its adverbial phrase form "a tort," meaning "wrongfully" or "by wrong") is an archaic Law French expression appearing in early English legal pleadings and Year Books. The phrase functions as a modifier indicating that an act was done without legal justification — that is, tortiously or wrongfully.
In modern legal usage, "tort" standing alone has become a noun denoting the entire body of civil wrongs for which the law provides a remedy in damages. A tort is a civil wrong, distinct from a crime and from a breach of contract, that causes harm to a person, property, or legally protected interest, and for which the injured party may sue the wrongdoer in a civil court. The person who commits a tort is called a tortfeasor; the person harmed is the plaintiff or claimant.
Common Confusion
The phrase "a tort" (the adverbial Law French construction) should not be confused with the modern English noun "tort" (a civil wrong). Burrill's entry captures the older adverbial usage — "wrongfully," as in de ses avers à tort pris, meaning "of his beasts wrongfully taken." The modern noun "tort" is etymologically the same word but has undergone complete grammatical and conceptual transformation. A researcher encountering "a tort" in a Year Book or early plea will find it functioning as a modifier, not as a reference to a cause of action. Confusing the two can produce serious misreadings of early sources.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap is misreading Year Book and early common law pleading language. When a medieval or early modern source uses "a tort" or the phrase "à tort," it is using Law French adverbially — "wrongfully" — not invoking what we now call tort law as a category. The concept of tort as a unified body of civil wrongs is a much later analytical development; early courts and pleaders thought in terms of specific writs and forms of action, not a generalized law of torts.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should be alert to this shift when moving between pre-eighteenth-century sources and modern materials. A term that appears in a Year Book entry, a Bracton passage, or an early Abridgment may carry the adverbial sense; the same word in a nineteenth-century treatise or modern case almost certainly carries the noun sense.
The phrase also signals the broader importance of Law French literacy for anyone working in the early common law. "A tort" appears alongside related adverbial constructions — à main forte (by main force), sans cause (without cause) — that together constitute a grammar of wrongfulness in early pleading. Recognizing the pattern helps researchers parse claims and defenses in Year Book entries correctly.
Additionally, because Burrill's entry is sparse — a single illustrative phrase from a Year Book — researchers should not expect historical dictionaries to provide conceptual analysis of tort as a modern legal category. That analysis must be sought in treatises (Pollock, Salmond, Prosser) and in encyclopedia sources, not in period dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry in its stripped-down Law French form: "Of, or by wrong; wrongfully," supported by a single Year Book citation, Yearb. M. 3 Hen. VI. 20, illustrating the phrase de ses avers à tort pris. This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Law French terms — he records the phrase and its translation with a supporting example but does not attempt doctrinal exposition.
What Burrill does not provide — and could not have been expected to provide in a dictionary of this kind — is any account of how "tort" evolved from an adverb into the name of an entire field of civil liability. That story belongs to legal history and treatise literature rather than to lexicography. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a precise but narrow tool: reliable for decoding the adverbial phrase in early sources, silent on modern tort doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
The adverbial Law French usage is specific to the English common law tradition and its early American inheritance. Civil law jurisdictions (Louisiana, Quebec, and mixed systems) developed parallel concepts — delict and quasi-delict — through different linguistic and doctrinal channels, and the Law French phrase "a tort" has no operative presence in those traditions.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Torts (for the modern doctrine of civil wrongs)
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Law French (for the broader linguistic context of early pleading)
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Forms of Action (for the writ-based system within which "a tort" functioned as pleading language)