Definition
An obsolete Law French term meaning cost or charge. In the legal context of medieval and early modern practice, coust referred to an expense or financial burden, particularly as incurred in the course of legal proceedings or obligations. The term does not carry an independent technical legal meaning beyond this general sense; it appears primarily as a vocabulary item in Law French legal texts rather than as a term of art with defined legal consequences.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The word is not part of modern English vocabulary.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not present as a standalone entry. Related to "cost," defined as the amount paid or charged for something; price; expense.
The gap here is directional rather than conceptual: coust is simply an archaic Law French spelling of the same idea carried by the modern English "cost." There is no meaningful divergence in substance — the significance is purely orthographic and historical, and researchers should treat variant spellings as the primary research challenge.
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Common Confusion
Coust should not be confused with COUSTUMIER (also spelled Coutumier, Coustoumier), a related but distinct Law French term referring to a written collection of local customs, usages, and procedural forms in old French law. Burrill's entry for coust appears immediately adjacent to the entry for Coustumier, and the proximity in historical dictionaries can mislead a researcher scanning quickly. The two terms share linguistic ancestry but refer to entirely different legal concepts: coust is a financial term; coustumier is a genre of legal text.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter coust almost exclusively in medieval and early modern primary sources written in Law French — the technical legal language used in English courts from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. Its value to the modern researcher is almost entirely translational: recognizing the word and understanding that it means "cost" or "charge" prevents misreading of old plea rolls, year books, and legal manuscripts.
Several practical notes for corpus research:
First, spelling is wildly inconsistent in Law French sources. Coust, coost, cost, and related forms may all appear in the same document or across different scribal hands. Do not rely on a single spelling when searching manuscript or digitized sources.
Second, because coust carries no independent technical legal definition beyond its plain meaning, it will not appear as a headword in most common law dictionaries after the seventeenth century. Researchers who cannot locate it in later dictionaries should not assume the underlying concept is absent — it simply migrated into standard English as "cost" and was absorbed into statutory and procedural vocabulary without a separate Law French gloss.
Third, the term matters most in the context of cost awards in early common law proceedings. When old records describe the winning party's entitlement to coust or the court ordering payment of coust, this is the ancestor of modern cost-shifting rules in civil procedure. Tracing the development of cost awards in English law requires comfort with this and related Law French vocabulary.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among the Law Mind shelf sources. The entry is minimal: Burrill defines coust as Law French for "cost; charge" and cites Kelham's dictionary of Norman French as authority. The brevity reflects the term's nature — it is a vocabulary gloss, not a term of art requiring extended analysis.
Burrill's entry is notable primarily for what it immediately precedes: the fuller entry for Coustumier, which receives considerably more treatment. This placement suggests Burrill viewed coust as a threshold vocabulary item rather than a substantive legal concept in its own right.
No other shelf sources provide independent entries for coust. Researchers needing fuller treatment of Law French legal vocabulary should consult Kelham's Normand Dictionary (1779), which Burrill himself cites, and which remains the standard reference for this class of term.
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Jurisdictional Note
Coust is a term of English legal history rooted in the Norman French legal tradition. It has no operative meaning in any modern jurisdiction and does not appear in contemporary statutory or common law. Its relevance is confined to historical legal research in the English common law tradition.
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