Definition
In old French law, to summon. The term denotes the act of formally calling a person to appear before a tribunal or authority. It is the French-origin root from which the English legal term "adjourn" partially derives, though the two words carry distinct meanings in practice. As used in medieval French legal sources, ajourner referred specifically to the issuance of a summons requiring a party to appear, not to the postponement of proceedings.
Common Confusion
Modern English readers will instinctively read ajourner as a variant of "adjourn," meaning to suspend or postpone a proceeding. This is a false cognate trap. Ajourner in its historical French legal sense means to summon or call to appear — an act that initiates or advances a proceeding, not one that delays it. The two words share a root but diverged in legal application. Researchers encountering ajourner in translated French legal texts, treatises on feudal law, or glossaries of Norman legal usage should not substitute the meaning of adjourn.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will surface almost exclusively in sources treating feudal French law or Norman legal history — most often in secondary translations of or commentaries on Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des Lois and comparable treatises on medieval continental procedure. Burrill preserves the term primarily as a linguistic artifact to anchor the etymology of "adjourn" and to illuminate the feudal context from which summoning procedure derived.
The feudal dimension embedded in the term is substantively significant: as Burrill's source material makes clear, the right to summon was not universal within the feudal hierarchy. Peers could not summon their own lord — the act of ajourner ran downward through the chain of obligation, not upward. Peers could summon on behalf of their lord, but not against him. This asymmetry reflects a structural feature of feudal jurisdiction that researchers working on the development of compulsory process, the origins of subpoena power, or the constitutional limits of judicial authority over sovereign persons may find instructive.
Researchers should be alert to the fact that English-language digests and dictionaries from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sometimes use ajourner, adjourn, and their variants loosely, particularly when translating or paraphrasing French sources. Verify the original language and context before treating these as synonymous.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source preserving this term in the Anglo-American legal dictionary tradition, and its treatment is brief. Burrill quotes directly from Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des Lois (Book 28, Chapter 28) to illustrate the feudal summons context: "he could not summon by the peers, for the peers could not summon their lord; but they might summon for their lord." Burrill then cross-references the entry to Adjourn, signaling that he treats ajourner chiefly as a historical and etymological predecessor rather than an independent term of art with ongoing practical application.
No substantive elaboration appears in Burrill beyond the quotation and the cross-reference. Researchers seeking deeper treatment of the feudal summoning procedure behind this term must go to Montesquieu directly, or to specialized scholarship on medieval French procedure and feudal court jurisdiction. The Anglo-American legal dictionary tradition does not develop ajourner as an independent doctrinal concept.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Adjourn; Feudal Courts and Tenure; Compulsory Process