Definition
An archaic Law French term for a cutpurse — a thief who steals by cutting or picking another person's purse or bag. The term describes a specific category of petty thief recognized in early English law, distinct from burglars or robbers by virtue of the method and circumstance of the taking: a covert, manual act against a person's carried property in a public or crowded setting.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in early English legal sources — treatises, plea rolls, and criminal records predating the consolidation of larceny doctrine in the common law. Researchers encountering it in medieval or early modern manuscripts should treat it as a precise technical label for a recognized criminal type, not merely descriptive language. The significance lies in classification: early English law sometimes distinguished cutpurses from other thieves for purposes of punishment, benefit of clergy eligibility, or categorization within local court jurisdiction.
The term is essentially obsolete in any operative legal sense and will not appear in modern statutes or case law. Its research value is archaeological — it illuminates how early criminal law carved out subcategories of theft based on method and context long before modern larceny, robbery, and pickpocketing offenses were systematized. Researchers working in the history of theft offenses, vagrancy law, or the development of larceny doctrine should note that figures like the cynsour de burse were forerunners of what would later be addressed under statutes targeting pickpockets specifically.
Britton (c. 15), cited by Burrill, is one of the earliest Anglo-Norman legal treatises and a primary source for Law French criminal terminology of this period. Any researcher tracing this term should go directly to Britton as the foundational text.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source providing an entry for this term, and the entry is spare: it translates the term as "cutpurse," supplies the parenthetical Law French gloss celuy que la burse coupe (literally, "one who cuts the purse"), and cites Britton, chapter 15. There is no extended discussion of legal consequences, procedure, or doctrine.
The gloss itself is instructive. The Law French construction — celuy que la burse coupe — is functional and descriptive rather than formalistic, consistent with the character of early Anglo-Norman legal terminology, which often named offenders by their acts rather than by abstract legal categories. This stands in contrast to later common law taxonomy, which would absorb the cutpurse into the broader category of larceny from the person.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus (Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, Black's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Wharton's Law Lexicon) carry an entry for this term, which itself signals its limited currency outside of archaic and scholarly contexts. Researchers should not expect cross-referencing support from those sources.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to early English legal tradition and has no recognized equivalent in American, Scottish, or civilian legal systems. It belongs to the Anglo-Norman stratum of English legal language and is relevant only to English legal history prior to the codification and rationalization of theft offenses.