Definition
An archaic Law French verb meaning to flee, run away, or elope. In medieval English legal usage, *defuer* described the act of a person — most commonly a wife — absconding from a lawful companion or custodian. The term carried legal consequence in the context of marital desertion, where a wife who had *defuy* (eloped from) her husband forfeited certain legal protections or rights she might otherwise have claimed.
Related forms appearing in historical sources include *defuiaunt* (running away; the present participial or adjectival form) and *defuont* (run away; the past form), both recorded in Kelham's glossary of Law French terms. The phrase preserved in Britton — *apres ceo que el avera defuy son baron* ("after she shall have eloped from her husband") — illustrates the term's primary legal context: determining the legal status of a wife who had voluntarily left the matrimonial home.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The word does not exist in modern English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term was already archaic and confined to legal French by the nineteenth century.
The word has no life outside of medieval Anglo-French legal texts. It is pure professional vocabulary of the old common law, untranslatable into any common English equivalent without losing the legal freight it once carried.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter *defuer* and its inflected forms almost exclusively in three contexts: Law French primary sources (particularly Britton and similar treatises from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), glossaries of Law French compiled for common lawyers (Kelham being the standard reference), and secondary scholarship on the legal status of married women in medieval England.
The practical legal weight of the term lies in its connection to dower rights and the law of husband and wife. Under early common law, a wife who eloped from her husband — who *defuy son baron* — and lived in adultery with another man could lose her right to dower in his lands. This consequence was addressed explicitly in the Statute of Westminster II (1285), c. 34, which conditioned recovery of dower on the wife's return to her husband before his death or on the husband's voluntary reconciliation. Researchers tracing the history of dower, coverture, or the legal disabilities of married women should note that *defuer* and its forms are linguistic markers pointing directly into this body of law.
The term also signals a deeper research trap: Law French inflects differently from modern French, and forms like *defuiaunt* and *defuont* will not respond to searches calibrated to modern French vocabulary. Corpus searches in medieval legal texts should account for spelling variation, as scribal practice was inconsistent even within a single document.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary anglophone source for this term, drawing directly on Kelham's *Glossary of Norman and Old French Words* for the verb and its participles, and quoting Britton for the legal usage in context. Burrill adds no independent analysis; his entry is essentially a transmission of Kelham into an American legal dictionary.
No other major historical legal dictionary — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Jacob's — appears to carry an entry for *defuer* as a standalone term. Its absence from those dictionaries reflects both the deep archaism of Law French terminology in general legal practice by the nineteenth century and the fact that the underlying legal concept (forfeiture of dower by elopement) had been absorbed into statutory and treatise discussion without the Norman French label.
What historical dictionaries collectively miss is the substantive legal doctrine to which the term attaches. Kelham and Burrill preserve the word; neither explains what rode on it.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs entirely to the medieval English common law tradition and has no currency in any modern jurisdiction. It surfaces only in historical legal research touching English law before the seventeenth century.
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