Definition
Debruser is a Law French term meaning "to break." In legal usage it appears in two distinct applications:
1. (Verb) To break or forcibly breach, as in breaking a prison. Used in the phrase *ceux queux ount debruse la prison* — those who have broken the prison — to describe the act of prison breach or escape by force.
2. (Noun/Debt law) A debt due, or acknowledged to be due, by some instrument under seal. This includes debts arising from a deed of covenant, a deed of sale, a lease reserving rent, or a bond or obligation. In this sense debruser is essentially synonymous with a specialty debt — a debt of record or instrument as distinguished from a simple contract debt.
Common Confusion
The two meanings operate in entirely separate legal contexts and should not be read interchangeably. The prison-breaking sense (from the verb *debruser*, to break) appears in medieval criminal and procedural statutes. The debt-by-sealed-instrument sense reflects a distinct technical usage preserved in commentary on the forms of action. Burrill's entry conflates them under a single headword without clearly separating them; researchers encountering either meaning in a historical source should confirm which usage applies from context before drawing any doctrinal conclusion.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with early English statutes, Year Books, or Law French sources will encounter debruser almost exclusively in criminal and procedural contexts — principally in connection with prison breach under the Statute of Westminster I (1275), chapter 15. The term appears rarely and only in archaic Law French materials; it does not survive into modern common law vocabulary in either sense.
The debt-instrument meaning is the more practically significant of the two for doctrinal research. When Burrill connects debruser to specialty debt, he is bridging Law French usage to the English common law distinction between debts by specialty (sealed instruments) and debts by simple contract — a distinction that governed priority among creditors, the applicable statute of limitations, and the proper form of action (debt on a specialty versus assumpsit). Researchers tracing the historical treatment of sealed instrument debt should treat this entry as a linguistic pointer to the specialty/simple contract distinction rather than as an independent doctrinal concept.
Flag for corpus researchers: because the term appears in two formally unrelated contexts within the same headword, keyword searching for "debruser" in the Law Mind corpus may surface both criminal law materials and debt-law materials. Confirm the operational sense before drawing research conclusions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary authority here, and his entry does the work of two definitions without announcing the division. The prison-breaking sense is anchored to Statute of Westminster I, chapter 15, and to Britton (chapter 11) — both genuine medieval sources. The debt-instrument sense is sourced to Blackstone's Commentaries, Book II at page 465, where Blackstone discusses specialty debts and their distinguishing characteristics. These citations are reliable guides to further primary source research.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus (Bouvier, Black's, Jacob's) carry a headword entry for debruser. The absence is expected: Law French terms of this specificity were absorbed into English doctrinal vocabulary under translated equivalents (specialty, prison breach) rather than preserved in their French forms.
Jurisdictional Note
Debruser is a term of English legal history with no continuing operative use in any common law jurisdiction. Its doctrinal content — the law of specialty debts and the crime of prison breach — persists in modern law under wholly different vocabulary.