Definition
Old Law French phrase meaning "good men," used in early English legal proceedings to describe persons qualified to serve as jurors. The phrase appears in the context of jury selection, specifically in challenges to the array or to individual jurors at the polls. A properly returned jury was expected to consist of *bones gents*—individuals of sufficient standing, impartiality, and character to render a lawful verdict. Where the sheriff returned jurors who did not meet this standard, the aggrieved party's recourse was a challenge directed at those specific individuals.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a marker of medieval English legal procedure and surfaces almost exclusively in Year Book materials and early common law treatises. Researchers encountering *bones gents* in original sources should understand it as a term of art for juror qualification, not a mere descriptive phrase. Its significance lies in the jury challenge framework: the phrase implicitly defines what a lawful jury looks like, and its negation is the foundation of the challenge to the polls.
Because the term is Law French, it will not appear in English-language indexes or keyword searches without deliberate accommodation. Researchers working in Year Book collections, Coke's reports, or Mirror of Justices materials should search under both the French phrase and its English cognates—"good men," "qualified jurors," "challenge to the polls"—to capture the full range of relevant passages. The phrase is rarely glossed in later sources, so the Burrill entry with its Year Book quotation is among the most useful secondary touchpoints in the Law Mind corpus.
No modern doctrinal significance attaches to the phrase itself, but its conceptual content survives in modern jury qualification standards and in the law of peremptory and for-cause challenges. A researcher tracing the historical foundations of juror competency requirements will find *bones gents* at the root of that lineage.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core translation—"good men (of the jury)"—and treat the phrase as belonging to old English law. Black's (both editions) supplies only the bare gloss without elaboration. Burrill's is substantively richer: it identifies persons qualified to act as jurors as the referent, cites the Mirror of Justices (Mirr. c. 1, § 3) and Coke's preface to the ninth report (9 Co. pref.), and quotes a Year Book passage from Trinity Term, 5 Edward III, 21, which illustrates the practical stakes directly—if the sheriff returns *bones gents*, the jury stands; if he returns others, the party's remedy is a challenge to the polls.
The Burrill entry is the only one in the Law Mind corpus that contextualizes the phrase within actual procedural mechanics. Black's treatment in both editions functions as a translation note rather than a definition. Researchers should treat Burrill as the primary Law Mind reference for this term and use the Black's entries only for initial identification. None of the source dictionaries address the term's disappearance from legal usage or its relationship to later jury competency doctrine—a gap that must be bridged by consulting Year Book scholarship and treatise literature directly.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs exclusively to early English common law and has no direct application in American, Canadian, or other common law jurisdictions. Its relevance to modern practice is historical only.