Definition
An archaic Law French particle meaning "this" or "that." Found in early common law texts and Year Book sources, *cel* functions as a demonstrative adjective or pronoun. It appears most often in set phrases such as *a cel jour* ("on this day" or "at that day"), used in pleading and conveyancing contexts to fix a point in time or to refer with precision to a matter already identified in the record. The term has no independent legal significance today; its importance is entirely historical and philological.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A piece of celluloid on which a frame of an animated film has been drawn.
The modern common meaning and the legal meaning share nothing but their spelling. A researcher encountering *cel* in a legal source should not bring any ordinary English association to the word. Context — specifically, a pre-modern legal text in Law French — is the only reliable signal that the legal sense is intended.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval and early modern common law materials — Year Books, Littleton's *Tenures*, Coke's commentaries, and the older plea rolls — will encounter Law French particles like *cel* embedded in passages that are otherwise partially Latinized or partially English. Misreading or skipping such particles can distort the meaning of a clause, particularly when the particle anchors a temporal or referential phrase.
The specific phrase *a cel jour*, cited in Burrill against Littleton sections 140 and 217, appears in discussions of tenure and feudal obligation where the precise day of performance or default carries legal weight. In those contexts, *cel* is doing real grammatical work: it ties the legal consequence to a specific, identified moment rather than a general period.
Researchers should also be aware that Law French was not a uniform language — spelling and usage varied across centuries and across different scribal traditions. *Cel* may appear as *cil*, *cel*, or in contracted forms depending on the manuscript or printed source. This orthographic instability can create indexing and search problems in digitized corpora. Keyword searching alone will not reliably surface all instances; browsing critical editions and glossed texts remains necessary for thorough coverage.
Because *cel* is a function word rather than a term of art, it rarely appears as a headword in legal dictionaries and is frequently left unglossed in modern reprints of old sources. Burrill is one of the few English-language law dictionaries to flag it explicitly, making his dictionary a useful checkpoint when such particles cause confusion in primary sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is spare but accurate: he identifies *cel* as Law French for "this," supplies the phrase *a cel jour*, and cites Littleton sections 140 and 217. No elaboration is offered, which is appropriate — the word is a grammatical particle, not a legal concept requiring extended analysis.
Historical legal dictionaries in the common law tradition generally give minimal treatment to Law French function words. Blount, Cowell, and Jacob focus on terms of art; particles like *cel* tend to appear only when a specific phrase has acquired a recognized legal meaning (as *a cel jour* arguably had in pleading). Researchers who need fuller philological treatment should consult specialized Law French glossaries rather than relying on standard legal dictionaries.