Definition
An Old French (Law French) verb meaning to advise, to consider, to deliberate, or to consult. Used in early English legal proceedings and Year Book reports to record that a court or party was taking time to reflect before issuing a ruling or giving an answer. The term appears in formulaic phrases noting judicial pause or deliberation — most commonly to indicate that a court was reserving judgment pending further consideration, or that a party was being directed to reconsider a pleading or response.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current English entry; the term is not in active ordinary use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. By the nineteenth century the term had passed entirely out of living usage, surviving only in legal historical records.
Editorial note: This is a term of pure Law French procedural vocabulary with no counterpart in modern common English. The closest living relatives are the English words "advise" and "consider," from the same Latin and French roots, but neither captures the specific procedural context in which aviser appeared.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Year Book materials or early plea roll transcripts will encounter aviser in formulaic Latin-French mixed entries recording the posture of a case at a given stage. The critical navigational point is that a phrase like "la court se voet aviser" does not mean the court issued advice or rendered judgment — it means the court expressly withheld a decision and reserved the matter. Misreading the phrase as a substantive ruling rather than a procedural pause is a significant interpretive trap.
The term clusters with other Law French deliberative formulas. Seeing aviser in a Year Book entry signals that what follows — or what the researcher must look for in a subsequent term's entry — is the actual resolution. If the resolution entry is missing or damaged, the aviser entry marks the last confirmed procedural moment in the record.
Jurisdictional reach is limited to English common law courts of the medieval period, primarily the central royal courts (King's Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer). There is no parallel usage in Scots law, canon law, or early American sources.
Researchers should also note that Burrill's examples span a narrow window — the reign of Edward III (1327–1377) — suggesting the term had its peak procedural currency in the mid-fourteenth century. By the sixteenth century, English legal records increasingly shift toward Latin and then toward English, and aviser recedes accordingly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantial treatment in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill correctly identifies the term as Law French and supplies four illustrative Year Book quotations, each demonstrating a distinct shade of the word's use: collective court deliberation ("nous volomus aviser"), judicial self-informing on a specific issue, direction to a party to reconsider an answer, and individual judicial hesitation. These examples together establish that aviser functioned at multiple levels of the proceeding — the court collectively, the court with respect to a single issue, and the individual judge or party.
No other historical dictionary in the standard shelf sources (Bouvier, Black, Jacob, Tomlin) carries a dedicated entry for this term. Its absence from those works reflects the term's status as a Year Book curiosity rather than a term with continuing doctrinal life by the time those dictionaries were compiled. Burrill, with his stronger orientation toward historical and Law French vocabulary, is the appropriate authority here.
The Dyer reference in Burrill ("Il voile aviser; he wished to consider it") points toward Dyer's Reports, the sixteenth-century English reports attributed to Sir James Dyer, suggesting the term had some residual presence even into early modern reporting practice, though by then it would have been archaic.
Jurisdictional Note
Aviser is specific to medieval English common law practice as recorded in the Year Books and early reports. It has no recognized usage in American law at any period and does not appear in civil law or equity traditions as a technical term.