Definition
A Law French term meaning "fallen." Recorded in Burrill's Law Dictionary with the single gloss: "Fallen. Kelham." The term appears in historical legal sources as a descriptive word, likely used in pleading or property contexts to indicate that something — a tree, a structure, a right, or a condition — had fallen or lapsed. It does not carry an independent doctrinal meaning in modern law and survives only as a historical linguistic artifact of the Anglo-Norman legal vocabulary that dominated English common law pleading through the early modern period.
Note on the source entry: Burrill's entry for CHAYE is immediately followed in the original text by the entry for CHEAT or CHEATING, and the truncation of the printed source has caused the two entries to appear run together in some reproductions. CHAYE and CHEAT are distinct entries. Researchers should not conflate them.
Common Confusion
The most likely research error with CHAYE is misreading the truncated Burrill entry as a single continuous definition connecting "fallen" to the law of cheating or fraud. The two entries are adjacent, not related. CHAYE means only "fallen" in its Law French sense. CHEAT and CHEATING — the entries that immediately follow — concern criminal fraud and fraudulent obtaining of property by deceitful practice. These are separate terms with no doctrinal connection to CHAYE.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records, Year Books, or Law French pleading documents will occasionally encounter CHAYE or its variants as a past participial descriptor. Its significance is almost always contextual — identifying the state of a thing (fallen timber, a collapsed structure, a lapsed term) rather than establishing a legal standard or cause of action.
Two practical traps exist in the Law Mind corpus:
First, source truncation. Burrill's entry is cut off mid-sentence in surviving reproductions, and the adjacency of CHAYE to CHEAT has caused some indexes and digests to treat them as a single compound entry. Always verify that you are reading the correct entry heading before relying on the surrounding text.
Second, variant spellings. Law French orthography was never standardized, and "fallen" concepts appear across historical sources under variant forms. A researcher who finds CHAYE in a primary source should check surrounding context for related terms such as ESCHETE (escheat, property that has "fallen" to the lord) and CADIT (Latin equivalent, "it falls," used in pleading to indicate a failed claim). The conceptual family around falling, lapsing, and forfeiture is large, and CHAYE sits at its linguistic edge.
For researchers tracing the law of fallen timber and waste, CHAYE may appear in manor court rolls and forest records as a descriptor for windfall or deadfall wood. In that context it connects to the law of ESTOVERS and WASTE rather than to fraud or criminal law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary (mid-nineteenth century) provides the only entry in the Law Mind shelf for CHAYE, citing Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language as its authority. Kelham's work is the standard reference for Law French vocabulary and its entry for CHAYE confirms the plain meaning: fallen, having fallen down.
No other shelf source — Black's, Bouvier's, Tomlin's, Jacob's — carries an independent entry for CHAYE, which itself signals the term's limited doctrinal weight. It is a vocabulary entry, not a legal concept entry. Historical dictionaries of Law French (Kelham, Rastell) are the appropriate primary references for any researcher needing to trace usage in original sources. Burrill functions here as a secondary index pointing toward those specialized linguistic authorities rather than providing independent legal analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
CHAYE has no modern jurisdictional relevance. It is a historical Law French term confined to English common law sources predating the eighteenth century. It does not appear in American, Canadian, or other common law jurisdictions as a term of art.