Definition
An archaic Law French adverb meaning "as" or "so," used in medieval English legal pleading and court records to introduce comparisons, equivalences, or parallel constructions. It appears in several fixed phrases: *auxy pleinment* ("as fully"), *auxy sovent que* ("as often as"), and *auxy icy* ("so here"). The term carried no independent substantive legal meaning; it was a connective or comparative particle functioning grammatically within formal legal text.
Common Language
Auxy has no meaningful presence in modern ordinary English and no entry in current general dictionaries. As a Law French particle, it is purely a feature of medieval legal drafting and has no common-usage counterpart against which to measure a gap.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in Year Books, early plea rolls, and texts derived from them — sources that predate the systematic displacement of Law French from English legal proceedings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its significance is grammatical rather than doctrinal: misreading *auxy* as a term of art rather than a comparative particle can distort the meaning of the clause in which it appears.
The fixed phrases matter most. *Auxy pleinment* (as fully) commonly appears in provisions preserving rights or powers to their complete extent — a reading that could affect interpretation of the underlying substantive obligation if the particle is overlooked or mistranslated. *Auxy sovent que* (as often as) marks a repeating condition and is functionally equivalent to a modern "whenever" clause. *Auxy icy* (so here) signals a cross-reference or analogical application within the same document or argument.
Burrill's citation to *Articuli super Cartas* c. 1 for *auxy pleinment* places the term in the confirmatory statutes of Edward I's reign, where the phrase reinforced prior grants. Researchers using those statutory texts in translated or abstracted form should verify whether the comparative particle and its scope have been preserved.
No modern legal research database indexes this term as a searchable concept. It will surface only in full-text searches of digitized Year Book transcriptions or Latin and Law French primary source collections.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole shelf source covering this term, and his treatment is appropriately spare: he identifies the language (Law French), supplies the English glosses, and anchors the phrases to specific historical sources. The Articuli super Cartas reference and the Henry VI Year Book citation for *auxy icy* are the principal textual anchors he provides. Burrill does not editorialize on grammatical function, and no other standard legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — Black's, Bouvier's, Tomlin's, or Jacob's — carries an entry for this term, reflecting its obsolescence as a research keyword well before those works were compiled.
The placement of the Burrill entry immediately preceding AVAIL / Aval is alphabetical coincidence, not conceptual relation. Researchers should not infer any connection between auxy and the substantive term avail.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the English common law tradition and its Law French textual heritage. It has no counterpart in civilian legal systems or in American legal usage at any period.