Definition
Detrie is a Law French term meaning "tried" or "tries." It appears in medieval English legal records and pleading documents as a past participle or conjugated form of the verb denoting trial or judicial determination. The term belongs to the technical vocabulary of Anglo-Norman legal French that dominated English court proceedings from the Norman Conquest through the early modern period. In practice, it functioned as a term of art in writs, pleadings, and statutes to signal that a matter had been submitted to and resolved by a court or jury.
Note: Burrill's entry for DETRIE also runs directly into DETT (Dette, Det), a closely related Law French term meaning "debt" or "a debt," along with the related verb form dettour ("debtor"). These are distinct terms that appear in proximity in the historical sources, and researchers should take care not to conflate them. See COMMON CONFUSION below.
Common Confusion
Burrill's entry conflates DETRIE and DETT within a single continuous passage, creating a risk that researchers working from transcriptions or digests will treat them as variants of the same word. They are not. DETRIE derives from the verb meaning to try; DETT derives from the Latin debitum, meaning what is owed. The proximity in Burrill is a dictionary artifact of alphabetical ordering, not a semantic relationship. A researcher encountering either term in a medieval writ or statute should verify context carefully: detrie will appear in procedural or pleading language concerning trial; dett or dette will appear in substantive claims sounding in debt or in the action of debt.
Why It Matters in Research
Detrie surfaces almost exclusively in Law French legal texts, statutes, and early common law reports from the medieval and early modern periods. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note several navigational points.
First, Law French orthography was highly unstable. Scribal variants such as detrie, detré, destrie, and similar forms may appear depending on the manuscript tradition, the century, and the copyist. A keyword search on any single spelling will likely miss cognate forms.
Second, the term is most likely to appear in procedural contexts — writs of trial, pleading records, and statutes governing jury process — rather than in substantive doctrine. It is a word of procedure, not of right.
Third, because Burrill's entry runs DETRIE into the DETT cluster without a hard break, researchers using Burrill as a finding aid must read the full surrounding passage to determine which term is actually at issue in their primary source.
Fourth, by the time legal English displaced Law French as the language of pleading (formally accelerated by the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731 in England), terms like detrie disappeared from active use. They survive only in historical texts, and their meanings must be reconstructed from context and glossaries such as Kelham's Norman-French Dictionary (cited by Burrill) and similar reference tools.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this term, and his entry is brief: "L. Fr. Tries; tried." The authority he cites is Kelham — a reference to Robert Kelham's A Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), which remains a standard gloss on Law French vocabulary. Burrill also cites Britton (Britt.), the thirteenth-century treatise on English law written in Law French, as a contextual source.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in common use — not Tomlin, not Bouvier, not Black's in its early editions — carry an independent entry for detrie. This reflects how narrowly the term was confined to the earliest stratum of Anglo-Norman legal writing. By the time the major American and later English dictionaries were compiled, the term had long passed out of active use.
What the historical sources miss: Burrill's treatment is essentially a gloss, not an analysis. There is no discussion of how detrie was used in specific procedural contexts, how it interacted with Latin equivalents such as probatus or tentatus, or how it varied across different courts. Researchers needing deeper treatment must go directly to primary sources and to Kelham's glossary.
Jurisdictional Note
Detrie is a term of English legal history. It has no independent American legal history and does not appear in American statutes or common law reports in its Law French form. Research utility is confined to English medieval and early modern primary sources and to scholarship on Anglo-Norman legal language.