Definition
In Law French legal usage, *avaunt* means "before," "beforehand," or "forthcoming." It appears in compound legal phrases and procedural expressions drawn from the Law French of medieval English courts. The term functions as a preposition or adverb of time and position, indicating precedence, prior action, or that a matter is actively proceeding.
Notable compounds recorded in Burrill include: *avaunt meyn* ("beforehand"); *plus avaunt* ("more fully"); and *quil soint avaunt* ("that they are proceeding on the business"). These phrases appear in pleading records, writs, and court entries from the medieval and early modern English legal tradition.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To advance or move forward; to depart or move away; to vaunt or boast.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An exclamation of contempt or abhorrence — "Begone; depart" — equivalent to "Get thee gone."
The gap here is nearly total. The common English word *avaunt* in both its historical and modern senses carries meanings of dismissal, departure, or boasting — none of which bear on the Law French legal term. A researcher encountering *avaunt* in a medieval legal record should not import any of the common English senses. The legal term derives from a distinct Law French root meaning "before" or "forward" in a temporal or procedural sense, not a command to leave or an act of self-promotion.
Common Confusion
*Avaunt* should not be confused with *avant*, to which Burrill's own entry cross-refers. The two terms share the same Law French root and meaning; *avaunt* and *avant* appear to be variant spellings in the historical record rather than terms with distinct legal meanings. Researchers should search under both spellings when working with manuscript sources or early printed legal records. Neither term should be confused with the common English exclamation *avaunt* (begone), which is unrelated.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational and interpretive trap for researchers unfamiliar with Law French. The dominant English-language meaning of *avaunt* — an archaic exclamation of dismissal — is precisely wrong for legal contexts. A reader encountering *quil soint avaunt* in a plea roll and importing the exclamatory English sense would misread the passage entirely; the phrase simply means "that they are proceeding on the business."
Spelling inconsistency compounds the problem. Medieval and early modern legal manuscripts were not standardized, and the same term may appear as *avaunt*, *avant*, *avante*, or in abbreviated forms. Corpus searches limited to a single spelling will miss occurrences. Researchers working in Law French materials should run parallel searches for both *avaunt* and *avant* and consult Kelham's *Law French Dictionary* (referenced in Burrill) for additional variant forms and contextual examples.
The compound phrases are the practical unit of meaning here. *Avaunt* standing alone in a legal text is less informative than the compound in which it appears. Researchers should treat the compounds — *avaunt meyn*, *plus avaunt*, *quil soint avaunt* — as the operative terms and search accordingly.
Because this term appears almost exclusively in Law French records predating the gradual displacement of Law French from English legal practice (largely complete by the early eighteenth century), it will rarely appear in post-1750 sources. Its relevance is confined to medieval and early modern English legal materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this term, and its entry is brief: a definition ("before; forthcoming"), two compound examples with translations, and a cross-reference to *Avant* and to Kelham as the underlying authority. Burrill adds no doctrinal context or illustrative case usage, which reflects the term's purely procedural and linguistic character — it is a function word in Law French, not a term of art with substantive legal content.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus (Bouvier, Black's early editions, Tomlin) appear to carry independent entries for *avaunt*. This makes Burrill, via Kelham, the primary authority. Researchers needing deeper coverage should consult Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779), which Burrill treats as the source for this and related Law French terms.