Definition
Chevisance is an archaic common law term with several related but distinct meanings, all clustering around the idea of concluding a transaction or reaching an agreement — particularly in a financial or contractual context. Its primary legal senses are:
1. A bargain, contract, or agreement, especially one made to settle a dispute between a creditor and debtor.
2. An unlawful or usurious bargain — a contract structured to evade statutory prohibitions on usury or otherwise extract an indirect, illicit gain.
3. More broadly, the act of making or completing a contract; bringing a matter to a conclusion.
The term appears most frequently in connection with Tudor-era English statutes targeting usury and evasive lending arrangements. By the time American legal dictionaries were compiling it, chevisance was already antiquated — a term of art for old English statutory law rather than living doctrine.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The raising or furnishing of money through some expedient; a contract or agreement about a disputed matter; chivalrous adventure; booty or provision. The word is marked obsolete in general use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Achievement; deed; performance. [Obs.]" Also: "A bargain; profit; gain. [Obs.]" Webster quotes Spenser ("Fortune, the foe of famous chevisance") and Piers Plowman, illustrating the word's range across chivalric achievement and mercantile dealing.
The gap between common and legal use is notable: in literary and general historical English, chevisance carried positive or neutral connotations — accomplishment, resourcefulness, even heroic adventure. In law, the term narrowed sharply to describe financial arrangements, with a persistent negative valence. Where Spenser used it to mean a worthy deed, the statutes of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I used it to flag an unlawful one.
Common Confusion
Chevisance is occasionally conflated with simple "composition" (a creditor-debtor settlement) or with "usury" itself. It is neither precisely. Composition is the broader genus; chevisance is a species — specifically the act of bargaining to a settlement or crafting a financial arrangement. Usury is the underlying offense; chevisance, in its pejorative legal sense, names the contractual mechanism used to commit it. The word also overlaps loosely with "chevizance" (a variant spelling) and should not be confused with the separate headwords Chevitiæ (pieces of ground at the ends of plowed fields) or Chezé (a homestead accessory to a house), which appear immediately adjacent in several historical dictionaries and have caused some indexing confusion.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering chevisance in primary sources will almost always be working with one of three bodies of material: (1) Tudor English statutes and their commentaries, particularly those targeting usury (the Henrician and Elizabethan usury acts cited in Burrill); (2) Blackstone's Commentaries, where the term appears in the discussion of unlawful contracts; or (3) older English equity and common law pleadings where creditor-debtor arrangements were challenged.
The term does not appear in American case law with any frequency and should not be imported into modern legal argument without care. Its significance for Law Mind corpus research is almost entirely historical and contextual: finding chevisance in a document is a reliable signal that the document concerns either the law of usury, a creditor-debtor dispute, or an effort to evade statutory restrictions on lending — and that the document is almost certainly pre-nineteenth century.
Watch for the spelling variant "chevizance." The two forms are interchangeable and both appear in the historical record. Indexing in older digests is inconsistent.
Burrill's derivation from the French chevir (to bring to a head, from chef) is useful interpretive context: when the word appears in a neutral sense in old records, it simply means "bringing a transaction to its conclusion" — completing a deal. The unlawful connotation is secondary, imposed by statute rather than inherent in the word itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in substantial agreement on the core meaning but differ in emphasis and depth.
Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence offer nearly identical brief entries: agreement or composition between creditor and debtor; indirect gain in usury; unlawful bargain or contract — all credited to Wharton's Law Lexicon. These entries are functional but thin.
Burrill provides the most useful account. He traces the derivation, cites the specific Tudor statutes (37 Hen. VIII c. 9; 13 Eliz. c. 5, 7, 8), anchors the term in Termes de la Ley and Dufresne, and distinguishes the neutral sense (making of contracts) from the pejorative one (unlawful or usurious bargain). Burrill's entry makes clear that chevisance was a term of art in the anti-usury statutory framework, not merely a synonym for "bad deal."
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: the word's richer general English life — the chivalric and literary senses documented in Webster and Wiktionary — goes entirely unacknowledged. This is appropriate for a law dictionary but means that a researcher reading chevisance in a non-legal text and then consulting only the law dictionaries will get a misleadingly narrow picture.
Jurisdictional Note
Chevisance is a term of English law with no independent American doctrinal life. It appears in American legal dictionaries as a matter of completeness and historical record, not because it names a recognized category of American law. Researchers working in American legal materials post-independence will rarely encounter it outside a dictionary or a scholarly gloss on English sources.