Definition
The party in a bailment relationship who delivers personal property to another for a specific purpose, with the expectation that the property will be returned or otherwise disposed of according to the terms of the agreement. The bailour (also spelled bailor) transfers physical possession but retains ownership of the property throughout the arrangement. Upon fulfillment of the bailment's purpose, the property reverts to the bailour or is dealt with as the bailour directs.
The term is the correlative of bailee: the bailour gives, the bailee receives and holds.
Common Confusion
BAILOUR vs. BAILY/BAYLY: Burrill's entry conflates two distinct terms in close proximity, creating a source-level trap. BAILOUR refers to the delivering party in a bailment. BAILY (or Bayly, Baylie) is a distinct Old English and Law French term meaning bailiff or a species of attorney — a representative through whom parties appeared in court. The phonetic and orthographic similarity between these terms in historical sources can mislead researchers scanning older dictionaries or Year Book materials. A "baily" acts on behalf of another; a "bailour" delivers property to another. The roles are legally unrelated.
BAILOUR vs. BAILOR (spelling): These are the same term. The -our ending reflects the Law French orthographic tradition; the modern spelling normalizes to -or. Both forms appear in historical legal sources and are treated as equivalent.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in historical sources will encounter the -our spelling predominantly in materials drawing on Law French vocabulary, including early English common law texts, Year Books, and dictionaries compiled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Modern case law and statutory materials will almost exclusively use bailor. Any corpus search limited to one spelling will miss the other.
The more significant trap is the proximity problem in historical dictionaries: Burrill's entry runs BAILOUR directly into BAILY without clear typographical separation, and the truncated entry (the Burrill text cuts off mid-sentence) means the full definition of BAILY is partially lost. Researchers relying on Burrill must treat the BAILY entry as incomplete and consult supplementary sources — particularly Co. Litt. 61b and the Year Book citations Burrill references — to reconstruct the full meaning of BAILY as distinct from BAILOUR.
Jurisdictional consistency is high for the core concept: the bailour/bailor as the delivering party in a bailment is stable across common law jurisdictions. Variation arises not in the definition but in the duties and liabilities attached to that status, which shifted significantly between the eighteenth century (when mutual benefit vs. gratuitous bailment distinctions were sharpening) and modern tort and contract frameworks.
Researchers tracing the liability of the bailour — particularly in gratuitous bailments or where the bailour has delivered defective goods — should be aware that nineteenth-century sources impose different standards than modern negligence doctrine. The older framework drew heavily on whether the bailment was for the benefit of the bailor, the bailee, or both, and assigned duty accordingly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source in the Law Mind corpus for this term, and the entry is brief to the point of incompleteness. Burrill identifies BAILOUR as a Law French term meaning surety and immediately pivots to BAILY, a different word. This suggests Burrill treated BAILOUR as a minimal entry — perhaps because the concept was sufficiently addressed under BAILMENT and BAILEE — and the surety gloss points to an older, broader usage of the term in which the bailour's role carried something of a guarantor character.
The surety meaning deserves attention: in early Law French usage, the delivering party in what we would now call a bailment was sometimes understood as standing behind the property — ensuring its purpose, warranting its condition, or remaining responsible for its ultimate disposition. This is not the modern primary meaning, where bailour simply denotes the delivering party without surety connotations, but it explains why Burrill leads with "surety" rather than "delivering party." Researchers finding the surety gloss in older materials should not assume the text is discussing a separate legal relationship; it likely reflects this archaic overlay on the bailment concept.
The truncation of the BAILY entry in Burrill is a corpus artifact, not a legal ambiguity. The Year Book citations Burrill provides (P. 8 Edw. III. 1; H. 10 Edw. III. 7) are authentic references to the Year Books of Edward III's reign, confirming the procedural use of baily as a court representative.
Jurisdictional Note
The term BAILOUR in its modern sense (bailor) is functionally uniform across common law jurisdictions. Scotland, operating under Scots law, uses deposit and loan for hire as the governing concepts rather than bailment, and the term bailor does not carry the same doctrinal weight there.