Definition
A Law French term meaning "differing" or "varying from." Used in pleading and legal argument to describe something that is inconsistent with, at variance with, or departing from something else — typically a prior statement, record, or instrument to which it is being compared.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term in historical legal materials — particularly in English Year Books, plea rolls, or early common law pleading records — should understand it as a technical signal that an inconsistency or variance is being alleged between two legal instruments, statements, or proceedings. A plea or verdict described as desaccordaunt with the record was being flagged as defective on grounds of internal contradiction or failure to conform.
The term is effectively extinct in modern legal writing. Its appearance in a source almost certainly dates the material to the medieval or early modern English common law period, when Law French remained the operative language of the English courts. Encountering it in a secondary source or digest without context is a reliable indicator that the underlying authority is of considerable age and should be verified against the original or a reliable early translation.
The term carries no jurisdictional survival into American law and will not appear in domestic case law or statutes. Its relevance to Law Mind corpus researchers is confined to materials treating the history of English pleading, the Year Books, or the broader vocabulary of Law French.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source covering this term, and its entry is minimal: the term is defined simply as "L. Fr. Different; varying from," with attribution to Kelham's glossary of Norman and Old French law terms. Kelham's work (Robert Kelham, A Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language, 1779) is itself a standard reference for Law French vocabulary, and Burrill's reliance on it here is characteristic of how nineteenth-century American legal lexicographers handled archaic French terms — by passing the definition through Kelham rather than independent analysis of primary sources.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the standard Law Mind shelf — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions, not Jacob's Law Dictionary — appear to carry an entry for this term. Its absence from those sources reinforces its status as a highly specialized piece of pleading vocabulary unlikely to be encountered outside of Year Book scholarship or specialized historical treatments of Norman French legal usage.
Researchers should note that Burrill's coverage of Law French terms, while useful, is necessarily derivative. Where the underlying sources can be identified (as here, with Kelham), consulting those sources directly will yield more context than Burrill alone provides.