Definition
An aventure is a death caused by mischance or accident — that is, a fatal occurrence without criminal intent, without felony, and without the fault of any identifiable wrongdoer. The classic examples are drowning, falling into fire, or being struck by a falling object. As a legal category, aventure functioned to distinguish accidental death from homicide, manslaughter, and other culpable killing, with significant consequences for how the death was treated at law and what, if anything, was forfeited to the Crown.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An obsolete form of "adventure."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Accident; chance; adventure. Also, in legal usage: a mischance causing a person's death without felony, as by drowning, or falling into the fire.
The common English word drifted toward the sense of exciting or voluntary undertaking — "adventure" in the modern sense. The legal meaning ran in precisely the opposite direction: passivity, misfortune, and the absence of human agency or intent. A researcher encountering "aventure" in a historical legal text should resist any association with the modern word "adventure" entirely. The legal term is about blameless accident, not purposeful action.
Common Confusion
Aventure is easily confused with chance-medley and misadventure, both of which also describe non-felonious deaths. The distinctions are technical but consequential in historical sources. Misadventure (or homicide per infortunium) typically involved some human act — usually lawful — that accidentally caused death; the classic example is a workman whose tool slips. Chance-medley involved a sudden affray without premeditation. Aventure, by contrast, was the purest form of accidental death: no human act, no affray, simply mischance. In older English authorities these categories blur and overlap, and different writers use them inconsistently. Researchers should not assume that a source using "misadventure" and one using "aventure" are describing the same legal category without verifying the specific context.
Why It Matters in Research
Aventure is a term of medieval and early modern English law, not a living common-law category. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century sources — treatises, Year Books, abridgements, and commentary rooted in the common law of homicide and deodand.
The primary practical consequence of a death being classified as aventure concerned deodand: the object or animal that caused the death was forfeited to the Crown (or to a lord) for pious uses. A death by aventure triggered deodand liability; understanding the classification therefore matters when reading coroner's records, plea rolls, or historical commentary on forfeiture.
The term disappears from active legal usage well before the nineteenth century. Bouvier includes it as a term of art worth knowing; by the time of Rapalje & Lawrence it appears in a brief, almost perfunctory entry. Researchers working in American legal sources from the founding era onward will rarely encounter it except in historical quotation or learned commentary.
One navigational trap: Rapalje & Lawrence's entry, as it appears in the corpus, contains an intrusion from unrelated material on lighthouse authorities under the Merchant Shipping Act. This is an artifact of source compilation, not a substantive connection. The operative definition in that entry is simply "an accident or mischance causing the death of a man without felony."
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Rapalje & Lawrence agree on the core definition: accidental death without felony. Both cite the concept's grounding in Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 391), the foundational common-law authority on the point. Webster's 1913 tracks this legal meaning accurately while also noting that the word had broader, non-legal currency in Chaucer's era as a synonym for chance or adventure generally.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the relationship between aventure and the coroner's inquest, the mechanics of deodand forfeiture that aventure classification triggered, or the gradual obsolescence of the term as criminal law systematized its homicide categories. Researchers needing that context must go beyond the dictionary entries to treatise literature — Bracton, Hale's Pleas of the Crown, and Blackstone's Commentaries are the principal sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Aventure is a term of English common law origin. American jurisdictions inherited the underlying concept (accidental, blameless death) but never adopted deodand, which was the primary legal consequence the classification carried in England. American legal writing rarely uses the term at all. Researchers working in the American corpus will encounter it only in sources explicitly drawing on English authority.