Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning costs — specifically, the costs of litigation awarded to a party in a legal proceeding. The term appears in early English legal records and reports as a direct borrowing from French legal usage, functioning as the plural form of coste (cost). In practice, costes was used interchangeably with the Latin and English equivalents to denote sums of money recoverable by a successful party for expenses incurred in bringing or defending an action.
The substantive concept behind costes is identical to the modern legal meaning of costs: court-imposed financial awards covering litigation expenses, typically assessed against the losing party in favor of the prevailing party. The term carries no distinct legal content beyond this; it is an orthographic and linguistic variant, not a separate doctrine.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of coste — no independent English meaning; treated as a foreign-language plural form.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an English entry; the term did not enter general English usage.
The gap here is one of register, not meaning. Costes never crossed into ordinary English. Its appearance in legal sources is entirely a product of Law French, the formal language of English courts from the Norman period through the seventeenth century. A reader encountering the term outside a legal-historical context would have no frame of reference for it.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English Year Books, Keilwey's Reports, or Dyer's Reports — the primary sources where costes appears — will encounter the term as a routine marker for cost awards, not as a term of art with any special procedural significance beyond what costs carries today. The risk is misidentification: a researcher unfamiliar with Law French may treat costes as an unknown term requiring separate investigation when it is simply the period-appropriate spelling of a familiar concept.
The Law French corpus presents this challenge repeatedly. Terms that look foreign often resolve to straightforward English legal concepts once the linguistic layer is stripped away. Costes is a clean example: Burrill's gloss — "costs" — is complete. No further doctrinal unpacking is required.
For research connecting early cost-award language to modern practice, the relevant bridge is the development of statutory costs regimes in English law, which gradually displaced the discretionary and formulaic approaches reflected in early reporters. Researchers tracking the evolution of costs doctrine should treat costes sightings as evidence of the pre-statutory baseline against which later statutory frameworks (and their American counterparts, including 28 USC 1920 and Rule 54(d)) developed.
No jurisdictional variation attaches to the term itself; it is a historical artifact with no ongoing doctrinal life in any American jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only historical dictionary support for this term, and its entry is minimal by design: costes is glossed as "costs," with citation to Keilwey 48 for the base form and Dyer 55b for the compound al costes (at the costs). Both citations are to well-established English reporters — Robert Keilwey's Reports (covering cases from the reign of Henry VII and Henry VIII) and Sir James Dyer's Reports (covering cases from roughly 1537 to 1582). The appearance of the term in both sources confirms its routine use across the mid-Tudor reporting period.
Burrill does not elaborate on the procedural context in which costes appeared, nor does it trace the term's displacement by English-language equivalents. That silence is characteristic of Law French entries in historical legal dictionaries generally: the dictionaries record the term and its translation but do not analyze the transition from Law French to English legal discourse, which was substantially complete by the late seventeenth century following the Acts requiring proceedings in English.
No other historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus addresses costes as a distinct entry.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Costs and Taxation of Costs — Rule 54(d) and 28 USC 1920 (The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia): The modern procedural framework governing what costes expressed in early English practice — the recovery of litigation expenses by a prevailing party.