Definition
To aver; to prove or establish a fact as true. In the context of civil pleading and practice, averer meant not merely to assert a fact but to make it out — to demonstrate or prove it to be true. The term carried an active, evidentiary weight rather than a purely declaratory one.
Common Confusion
Averer should not be confused with the modern pleading concept of averment, which refers to a formal positive allegation in a pleading. Averment is assertive; averer was evidentiary. The shift matters when reading historical pleading treatises: a party's right to averer was a right to prove, not simply a right to allege. Treating the two as synonymous flattens a procedural distinction that earlier courts took seriously.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early common law pleading materials or Anglo-Norman legal texts will encounter averer primarily in treatises and Year Books where French legal vocabulary was standard. The term is narrow in scope and largely obsolete, but it signals something important about the procedural posture of a claim: when a text says a party "may averer" something, it is describing a burden — the ability to prove — not merely the act of pleading. Conflating averment (the modern pleading concept of a formal allegation) with averer (the older act of proving) is an easy error when reading across periods. Sources post-dating the displacement of Law French will not use this term; researchers should look instead for "aver," "prove," or "establish" in modern equivalents. The term appears to be confined to civil pleading and practice, as Burrill notes — do not expect to find it in criminal procedure sources of the same era.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical source providing a formal entry for this term, and its treatment is brief but precise. Burrill identifies averer as a Law French term derived from the Latin verus (true) and illustrates its use through two quotations from Britton, a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise. Both quotations are conditional: "if John can prove that Peter…" and "if this be proved, the action abates." These examples confirm that the term functioned as a marker of evidentiary burden within civil pleading — the capacity or act of making a fact true before the court, not merely asserting it.
Burrill's notation that averer "appears to have been a term peculiar to civil pleading and practice" reflects the term's limited footprint even within historical legal vocabulary. No broader doctrinal development surrounds it; it is a procedural term of art embedded in the Law French tradition and does not reappear with independent meaning once English supplanted French in legal proceedings.