Definition
In old French law, the eldest-born child. A term of regional legal significance used principally in Poitou and other areas of France to designate the firstborn heir, carrying implications for inheritance and succession under local feudal custom.
Why It Matters in Research
CHEMIER is a term of narrow historical and geographical application. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in sources dealing with French feudal law, provincial customs, or the comparative inheritance systems that influenced early English and Anglo-Norman legal thought. It does not appear as a term of art in English common law and has no modern legal application. The primary research value is recognitional: encountering the word in a historical text and correctly identifying it as a regional French designation for the eldest child, rather than confusing it with a procedural or property term.
The term's regional character is important. Poitou and neighboring provinces operated under customary legal regimes that diverged meaningfully from the general customs of Paris and from the feudal law of the northern French territories most directly influential on English law. Succession rules in these regions sometimes elevated the eldest child's rights beyond what general feudal practice required, and CHEMIER signals you are reading within that regional customary tradition.
Researchers using Burrill's Law Dictionary should note that the entry for CHEMIER immediately precedes a separate entry for CHEMIN (also CHEMYN), meaning "a way" or "a journey" in Law French, with distinct citations to Britton. These are unrelated terms that appear in proximity only because of alphabetical ordering. Burrill's presentation runs the two entries together on the page in a way that can cause a hasty reader to conflate them. CHEMIN has its own line of authority and application in old English highway and road law; CHEMIER does not.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: eldest-born, used in Poitou and related areas. Black's (both editions) and Burrill rely on the same underlying authority, Guyot's Institutes of Feudal Law (Guyot, Inst. Feod. ch. 18, sect. 4 in Burrill's fuller citation), which grounds the term in French feudal institutional writing rather than in case law or statute.
None of the dictionaries provide English-language case authority, which is consistent with the term's nature as a foreign law term of art reported for reference rather than applied in English courts. The absence of English case citations is itself informative: CHEMIER was recorded in these dictionaries as part of the broader project of cataloguing continental and Anglo-Norman legal vocabulary, not because it was litigated in anglophone jurisdictions.
Burrill's entry is the most complete, supplying the full Guyot chapter and section reference. Black's both editions give only the short-form citation, suggesting they drew on Burrill rather than the primary source directly.
Jurisdictional Note
CHEMIER has no recognized application in any modern common law jurisdiction. Its significance is confined to the customary law of specific French provinces under the feudal system, and it is encountered today only in historical legal scholarship, comparative succession law, and the interpretation of pre-Revolutionary French legal texts.