Definition
A Law French term meaning "he has." Appears in historical legal pleadings and instruments where Law French remained the operative language of English courts, roughly from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. The term is a third-person singular present indicative form, equivalent to the Latin *habet* and the modern English "he has" or "she has." In pleading contexts, *ait* asserts present possession or entitlement: that a party has a right, has received something, or has standing to proceed.
The closely related form *aiet* carries the sense of "he shall have" — a future or conditional construction used in grants, judgments, and conditional pleadings. The participial form *ajant* or *ayant* (having) appears in descriptive phrases characterizing parties or their status.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An oat.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A small islet in a river or lake; an eyot. Used in literary and geographical contexts: "The ait where the osiers grew."
Neither common meaning — the grain nor the river islet — has any bearing on the legal term. A researcher encountering *ait* in a historical legal document should not mistake it for a topographical or botanical reference. The legal *ait* is purely a Law French verb form, and context (pleading, deed, court record) will distinguish it immediately from the common noun.
Common Confusion
*Ait*, *aiet*, and *ajant* are closely related but grammatically distinct. *Ait* is present indicative (he has); *aiet* is future or subjunctive (he shall have); *ajant* or *ayant* is participial (having). Misreading the tense can affect interpretation of a pleading — whether a right is being asserted as currently held versus as prospectively granted. Burrill groups these together, and researchers should treat them as a family rather than treating any one form as covering all three meanings.
Why It Matters in Research
*Ait* appears in the Law French pleading record and is not a term that survived into modern legal usage in any recognizable form. Researchers working in English common law records prior to the Act for Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731 (which mandated English in English courts) will encounter Law French verb forms throughout — in Year Books, early chancery documents, and plea rolls. *Ait* and its cognates are among the more functional, high-frequency forms: they appear wherever a pleading must assert that a party presently holds a right or property interest.
The practical trap: Law French is not modern French, and even researchers fluent in contemporary French may misread these archaic forms. *Ait* in modern French is the subjunctive of *avoir* and carries a different grammatical register than its Law French counterpart. Do not rely on modern French instinct when reading Law French legal records.
Burrill's treatment is sparse — three lines — which is typical of his handling of Law French function words. For richer context, researchers should consult Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779), which Burrill himself cites, and which provides more extensive paradigms for these verb forms. Kelham remains the specialist reference for Law French in legal instruments.
The corpus utility of this term is largely paleographic and philological: recognizing *ait* in a manuscript ensures correct parsing of the sentence structure of the pleading, which in turn determines what right or claim is being advanced.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is a compressed glossary note rather than a substantive definition. He identifies *ait* as Law French for "he has," gives the future form *aiet*, and cross-references *ajant/ayant* with the participial sense "having," citing Kelham. There is no other historical legal dictionary in the present corpus with an entry for this term.
What Burrill does not provide — and what no short-form legal dictionary can supply — is paradigmatic context: how these forms inflect, how they combine with nouns and prepositions in pleading formulas, and how they evolved across the several centuries of Law French usage. For that, Kelham and the Year Book literature are the necessary supplements.
Jurisdictional Note
Law French was the operative pleading language of English courts. This term has no application in jurisdictions that did not inherit the English common law tradition, and even within that tradition it is functionally obsolete in all modern practice. Its relevance is exclusively historical and archival.