Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "have" or "have it." Used in early legal proceedings and Year Book records as a directive or confirmatory expression, typically in the context of a party being declared to have or hold something — a right, a possession, or an entitlement — by the court's determination.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering AVEZ will almost exclusively find it in Year Book materials and early common law pleading records, particularly those predating the displacement of Law French from English courtrooms in the late seventeenth century. Its practical significance is narrow: the term is a functional verb, not a term of art with doctrinal weight of its own, and it rarely appears as the operative word in a legal rule or principle. Its value to the corpus researcher is therefore primarily linguistic — it signals the vintage and register of a source document and may appear in quoted or transcribed passages where translation is incomplete.
The specific citation in Burrill — Yearb. M. 4 Hen. VI. 26 — places this usage in the Michaelmas term of the fourth year of Henry VI's reign, roughly 1425–1426. Researchers working in early property, seisin, or possession disputes from this period may encounter the term in running Law French passages. Understanding that AVEZ simply means "have" prevents misreading of the phrase structure in those passages, where it might otherwise be confused for a proper noun or technical term.
Be alert to the fact that Law French vocabulary was not standardized in spelling, and variant forms — including AVETZ, AVER (in a different sense), and AVE — may appear across manuscripts and printed Year Book editions. The verb form also shifts with grammatical context; AVEZ is the second person plural or polite form, and other conjugations will appear depending on who is addressed.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal by design: a single gloss ("Have [it]") with one Year Book citation. This is characteristic of how Burrill treats Law French functional words — he identifies them for the researcher's benefit without attempting doctrinal elaboration, because none is warranted. The entry's brevity is itself informative, confirming that AVEZ carries no special legal meaning beyond its ordinary grammatical function in Law French.
No other historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to treat AVEZ as a standalone entry. Terms like AVOIR and AVERA appear in related dictionaries with more developed definitions tied to specific legal concepts (having goods, bearing obligations), but AVEZ as a simple verb form is not among them. Researchers should not infer from the silence of other dictionaries that the term was unusual — it was simply too common and too plain in meaning to require separate treatment in most reference works.
Jurisdictional Note
Relevant only to English common law sources predating the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731, which required legal proceedings in England to be conducted in English rather than Latin or Law French. The term has no operative significance in any modern jurisdiction.