Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "common." Comen appears in early English legal sources exclusively as an orthographic variant used in Law French texts and Year Book entries, not as an independent legal concept. It functions as a modifier in compound legal phrases, most notably:
1. La comen ley — the common law.
2. Le comen banke — the Common Bench (the court later known as the Court of Common Pleas).
3. Comen counsel — common council; the deliberative or advisory body associated with a municipality or, in certain contexts, with the realm.
The term carries no independent legal meaning apart from its role in these and similar compounds. It is significant only as a linguistic key: a researcher encountering comen in a medieval or early modern source can reliably read it as the equivalent of "common" in its legal sense — shared, public, general, or belonging to the whole — depending on the compound in which it appears.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Past participle of "come" (archaic or dialectal form).
Historical common usage: Not a recognized entry in Webster's 1913; the form does not appear in standard early modern English dictionaries as a common English word.
Editorial note: The ordinary English reader might associate comen with a conjugated form of "come," but the connection is false in legal contexts. In Law French legal sources, comen has no verbal function. The similarity is a false cognate trap: the word belongs entirely to the French-derived vocabulary of medieval English law, not to native English grammar.
Common Confusion
Comen should not be confused with common as it appears in modern legal English. The concepts are equivalent in meaning, but comen signals Law French source material — typically Year Books, early plea rolls, or digests drawing on Year Book authority. Treating comen as interchangeable with the modern English word common for citation or research purposes risks obscuring the source language and period of the authority being consulted. Researchers should also take care not to conflate comen counsel (common council, a deliberative body) with learned counsel or king's counsel, which are distinct concepts with their own histories.
Why It Matters in Research
Comen is a linguistic marker, not a substantive concept, and its research value is navigational. When you encounter it in Burrill or in a source Burrill is glossing, you are almost certainly working with a Year Book passage or an early digest entry drawing on Year Book authority — specifically, Thélwall's Digest (Thel. Dig.) and the Year Books of Edward III are the cited sources here. This tells you the material predates the consolidation of common law vocabulary into standard English legal prose, a transition that was largely complete by the late sixteenth century.
For corpus researchers, the practical implication is spelling variation. Year Books and early digests do not use consistent orthography. A search for "common law" or "common bench" will not retrieve passages written as la comen ley or le comen banke. Building searches around Law French variants — comen, commun, comun, and related forms — is necessary for comprehensive retrieval from early English legal materials.
The phrase le comen banke is particularly worth flagging. The court it names — the Common Bench — underwent formal renaming and jurisdictional evolution across centuries. Sources may refer to the same institution as le comen banke, the Common Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, or simply Common Pleas, depending on period and register. Researchers tracing the institutional history of that court should treat comen banke entries as the earliest stratum of a long documentary record.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole historical dictionary source for this term. His entry is compact but precise: he identifies comen as Law French for "common," provides three illustrative compounds, and supplies two source references — Thélwall's Digest (Thel. Dig. lib. 11, c. 10, §§ 8, 21) and the Year Books of Edward III's Michaelmas term (Yearb. M. 10 Edw. III. 67). The entry does not attempt substantive definition of the concepts behind the compounds, correctly treating comen as a vocabulary note rather than a doctrinal entry.
No other major historical law dictionaries — Bouvier, Black, Jacob, or Cowell — carry a separate entry for comen. This is consistent with the term's status as a spelling variant rather than an independent concept. The absence from those dictionaries is not a gap; it reflects the same judgment Burrill implicitly makes by keeping his own entry brief.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Law (for la comen ley)
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Bench / Court of Common Pleas (for le comen banke)