Definition
An archaic Law French term for a defender or defendant — specifically, the party accused or charged in an appeal. The term appears in early English legal records and texts where Law French was the working language of the common law courts. It corresponds to the modern defendant in criminal appeals and the defender in civil proceedings. In the context of medieval English procedure, an "appeal" was not merely a review of a lower court judgment but a formal accusation — often a private criminal charge — making the defendour the person against whom such an accusation was directed.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of defender.
Historical common usage: No entry in Webster's 1913; the term had no meaningful presence in ordinary English outside legal usage.
Editorial note: The common English word defender suggests someone who protects or defends in a general sense. In Law French legal usage, defendour is narrower and more technical — it identifies a specific procedural role, the accused party in a formal appeal, rather than any act of defense or protection.
Common Confusion
The term appeal, as used in the sources defining defendour, does not mean appellate review in the modern sense. A medieval appeal (appel) was a private accusation — a mode of initiating criminal proceedings by one individual against another. The defendour was the person so accused, not a party appealing a lower court ruling. Researchers unfamiliar with this procedural distinction may misread early sources as describing an appellate posture when in fact they describe an original criminal charge.
Why It Matters in Research
Defendour is essentially a dead term — it will not appear in modern case law, statutes, or secondary sources. Researchers will encounter it only in Law French texts, early English legal records, and historical legal dictionaries. Its value is almost entirely paleographic and contextual: recognizing the term correctly when it surfaces in a primary source and mapping it to modern equivalents.
Two traps await the unwary researcher. First, the procedural context of "appeal" in which defendour appears is consistently the medieval private criminal accusation, not modern appellate procedure. A source placing the defendour in an appeal is describing an accused person at trial, not an appellee in a reviewing court. Second, related Law French vocabulary compounds the risk of misreading. The verb defendre (to defend or protect) and the noun defendour appear in overlapping contexts, and their distinct functions — one a party designation, one an action — can blur in manuscript sources.
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the most useful shelf source here because it pairs the entry for defendour with a separate entry for defendre, giving the researcher both the noun and the verb in immediate proximity. This pairing clarifies that defendre describes the act (to warrant, acquit, and defend a tenant) while defendour identifies the procedural party.
The reference in the source entries to Britton (Britt. c. 22) points to the late thirteenth-century English legal treatise Britton, composed in Law French and attributed to the reign of Edward I. Britton is a primary source for early English procedural terminology, and researchers tracing the original usage of defendour should consult that text directly.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Burrill's — give essentially identical definitions: Law French, a defender or defendant, the party accused in an appeal, with the same citation to Britton chapter 22. There is no material divergence among them on the core definition.
Burrill adds substantive value by appending the entry for defendre immediately after defendour, quoting a Law French phrase that illustrates the verb in a feudal tenure context: "Garraunter, acquiter et defendre son tenaunt" — to warrant, acquit, and defend his tenant. This illustrates how the root concept of defense carried both personal and proprietary dimensions in early English law.
None of the three dictionaries addresses the procedural mechanics of the medieval appeal in sufficient depth to guide modern researchers. They correctly identify the term but do not flag the risk of anachronistic reading that arises when appeal is encountered in early sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Defendant; Appeal (Historical Forms); Law French Terminology in English Courts.