Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "course" or "practice," used in medieval English legal proceedings to describe established procedural custom — the regular, expected manner in which courts conducted their business. The phrase *ceo est un common cours* ("this is a common course") appears in the Year Books as a shorthand acknowledgment that a particular practice or procedural step was settled and routine, requiring no further justification.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An obsolete spelling of "course."
Historical common usage: "Course" in Webster's 1913 carries meanings including a habitual or customary manner of proceeding, a line of conduct, or a series of acts.
The gap here is narrow but worth noting: in ordinary historical English, "course" described a general path or sequence. In legal usage, *cours* carried the more specific force of recognized procedural custom — not merely something done habitually, but something done in the established manner of the court, with an implied claim of institutional sanction.
Common Confusion
Researchers may conflate *cours* with the modern word "court" (French: *cour*). These are distinct. *Cours* relates to process and practice; *cour* or "court" refers to the tribunal itself. In Law French texts, encountering *cours* should direct attention to procedure and custom, not to the institutional body.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in Year Book material and early common law sources written in or heavily influenced by Law French. Researchers working with Year Books from the 13th through early 16th centuries will encounter *cours* in formulaic phrases asserting that a procedural step is standard practice — a rhetorical move by counsel or the court to short-circuit objection by invoking custom.
The key research trap: *cours* in these sources is not descriptive reporting. When a Year Book records that something *est un common cours*, it is frequently an advocate's assertion, not a neutral observation. The claim that something was "common course" was itself a litigation tactic, used to establish that a procedural requirement was settled and the opposing party could not reasonably dispute it. Treating such statements as objective historical records of actual practice can mislead.
For corpus researchers, occurrences of *cours* cluster in procedural and pleading contexts, not in substantive doctrinal discussions. Searching for the phrase *common cours* in Law French Year Book sources will surface debates about pleading practice, default procedures, and the formalities of court proceedings rather than discussions of rights or obligations.
The term drops out of professional legal usage as Law French declines after the 17th century. Post-Restoration legal writing uses "course of the court" or "common course of practice" in English to convey the same idea. Researchers tracing procedural custom across this linguistic transition should map *cours* to those later English equivalents.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is spare but accurate. He glosses *cours* as "course; practice" and supplies the Latin root *cursus*, anchoring it to the idea of a running or proceeding — something flowing in its regular channel. His single Year Book citation (*Yearb. H. 8 Hen. VI. 21*) places the term firmly in the early 15th century. Burrill does not elaborate on the rhetorical function of the term, which limits the entry's utility for anyone trying to understand how *cours* actually operated in advocacy. No other major historical legal dictionaries (Cowell, Jacob, Tomlin) appear to have given the term independent treatment, likely because by the time those works were compiled, Law French had already receded and the term was understood only as a historical artifact.
Jurisdictional Note
*Cours* as a technical term is specific to the English common law tradition and its Law French procedural vocabulary. It has no direct equivalent in civil law systems and does not appear in Scottish, Irish, or colonial American legal materials in its Law French form, though the underlying concept of established court practice is universal.