Definition
An Old French (Law French) adverb meaning "commonly" or "in common opinion." The term appears in medieval English legal texts to signal that the statement following it reflects the prevailing or generally received legal understanding of the time, rather than a binding rule or a single authority's view. It functions as a qualifier, indicating that what follows is the common opinion or common practice among lawyers and courts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal sources — particularly Year Books, Littleton's Tenures, and Coke's commentary upon them — will encounter this term as a marker of interpretive weight rather than black-letter authority. When a source says "il est comunement dit," it is signaling that the proposition carries the force of received professional opinion, which in medieval and early modern common law carried considerable practical authority even without a precise statutory or case-law anchor.
The distinction matters: a statement introduced by comunement is not a maxim, not a statutory command, and not a direct judicial holding. It is closer to what modern lawyers might call "the weight of authority" or "the generally accepted view." Misreading it as a definitive rule overstates its force; ignoring it entirely understates its influence in period sources.
Researchers tracing the development of property or tenure doctrines through Littleton and Coke should note that this qualifier appears precisely where the law was unsettled or contested, making those passages significant markers of doctrinal evolution rather than established principle. The sections of Littleton's Tenures where comunement appears — and Coke's glosses upon them — are often exactly the places where later courts drew competing interpretations.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source recording this term, and its entry is characteristically compact: Burrill translates comunement as "commonly" and ties it directly to Littleton § 288 and Coke upon Littleton 186a, quoting Coke's clarification that "il est comunement dit" means "it is the common opinion." Coke's gloss is genuinely instructive here because it makes explicit what the phrase was understood to mean in professional practice — not mere hearsay or folklore, but the settled professional consensus of the bar.
Burrill does not develop the term beyond this, and no other major historical legal dictionaries in the standard corpus treat it as a standalone entry. Its absence from Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's, and similar compilations reflects its status as a functional term of Law French rather than a legal concept requiring independent definition. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a pointer to the Coke and Littleton passages rather than as a complete account.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the historical common law tradition of England and has no independent life in modern American or Commonwealth legal systems. It is relevant only in research involving pre-modern English legal texts, primarily those produced before the formal decline of Law French in English courts in the late seventeenth century.