Definition
In old English legal practice, *concordes* is a Latin plural adjective meaning "agreed" or "in agreement," used to describe jurors who had reached accord on a verdict. The term appears in medieval procedural contexts describing the state of the jury during deliberation and verdict delivery: jurors were either *omnes concordes* (all agreed) or divided into those who were *concordes* and those who were *discordes* (not agreed). The term does not describe a substantive legal right or doctrine; it is a procedural status word signaling whether unanimity had been achieved.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of *Concorde* — referring to multiple aircraft of the supersonic passenger jet type.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an English word; *concord* (the English derivative) denoted agreement, harmony, or union of minds.
The gap is total. In modern English, "Concordes" calls to mind supersonic aircraft. In medieval legal Latin, *concordes* was a technical term of jury procedure with no connection to any English usage, common or otherwise. A researcher encountering the word in old manuscripts or pleading records should read it as a procedural status descriptor, not import any modern association.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law records — Year Books, plea rolls, Bracton, or Fleta — will encounter *concordes* in passages describing jury deliberation. The word signals a moment in medieval trial procedure: the point at which the court assessed whether the jury had reached unanimity. Because medieval English jury practice required unanimous verdicts, the distinction between *omnes concordes* (all agreed) and a divided jury was procedurally significant, determining whether a verdict could be formally rendered.
The term appears almost exclusively in Latin-language sources predating the shift to English in legal records. Researchers using English-language digests or abridgments from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may find the concept absorbed into discussions of "unanimity" without the Latin term being preserved. When working backward from English-language secondary sources into primary Latin sources, recognizing *concordes* as the operative term prevents misreading.
Burrill preserves the Bracton and Fleta citations that anchor the term's procedural meaning. Any researcher tracing the historical requirement of jury unanimity in English law should treat those passages as primary anchors. The concept itself — jury unanimity as a precondition to verdict — is the substantive thread; *concordes* is the Latin vocabulary in which that concept was expressed during the formative period of common law jury practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this term, and its entry is concise but precise. Burrill correctly identifies *concordes* as a plural of *concors*, situates it in "old practice," and supplies the two critical Latin-language citations: Bracton (fol. 292) and Fleta (lib. 4, c. 9, § 2). The quoted passages are genuinely instructive because they show the term functioning inside a binary procedural framework — either all agree, or some agree and some do not.
No other major historical legal dictionaries (Jacob, Bouvier, Black's early editions) appear to carry a standalone entry for *concordes* as such, reflecting that the term was already archaic by the time English-language legal dictionaries became standard reference tools. Its survival in Burrill is owed to Burrill's comparative attention to Latin legal vocabulary. Researchers should treat Bracton and Fleta as the authoritative primary sources; Burrill functions here as a finding aid pointing back to those texts rather than as an independent authority.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is exclusively historical and English in origin. It has no operative role in any modern jurisdiction's legal vocabulary. Its relevance is confined to historical research into English common law jury procedure, principally from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.