Definition
An obsolete Law French term meaning a debtor. Used in early English legal records and pleadings to denote one who owes a debt to another. The term is a direct Law French rendering of the concept captured in the Latin debitor and the later English "debtor." It appears in medieval English legal instruments, rolls, and statutes where Law French was the operative language of the courts.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term does not appear in modern English usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. By the nineteenth century the term had entirely disappeared from both legal and common usage, replaced by the anglicized "debtor."
The term has no meaningful presence in ordinary English at any period. It is pure Law French legal vocabulary and functions solely as a historical term of art in legal records.
Common Confusion
DETTOUR, DETT, and DEUE are neighboring Law French debt-related terms that appear in close proximity in historical legal records and in reference works such as Burrill's. DETT is the Law French noun for the underlying debt obligation itself; DETTOUR is the person who owes it. DEUE (or Deve) means "due" — describing the quality of an obligation that has become payable. Researchers working through medieval plea rolls or early chancery records may encounter all three in a single document and should be careful not to treat them as interchangeable: one names the thing owed, one names the obligor, and one names the condition of maturity.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter DETTOUR almost exclusively in primary sources written in Law French — principally plea rolls, chancery rolls, and early English statutes predating the gradual displacement of Law French by English in legal proceedings (a process substantially advanced by the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731). The term does not survive into the common law reporting tradition in any functional sense; by the time of the Year Books in their later phases, and certainly by the era of the named reporters, "debtor" had taken its place.
The practical research trap is orthographic: Law French spelling was never standardized, and variants of this term may appear as detour, dettur, dettour, or detteur depending on the scribe, the period, and the jurisdiction of origin. A keyword search that captures only one spelling will miss occurrences of the others. Index and calendar entries in the printed calendars of state papers and close rolls will sometimes modernize or Latinize the term, so the searcher must work backward from the English or Latin equivalent to locate original Law French text.
The term also signals the age and provenance of a source. Its presence in a document is a strong marker that the text predates the eighteenth century and likely predates the seventeenth. This is useful for corpus dating when external dating evidence is weak.
Within the Law Mind corpus, DETTOUR connects directly to the cluster of Law French debt vocabulary (DETT, DETTE, DEUE) and to the broader framework of early debt actions — debt sur obligation, debt sur contract — which are the procedural ancestors of the modern action for money had and received and of assumpsit.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only historical dictionary treatment located for this term. Burrill's entry is characteristically compact: it identifies DETTOUR as Law French for "a debtor," cites Due c. 28 (a reference to Doderidge or a comparable early authority), and cross-references DETT. The entry is sandwiched between DEUE and DEUNX, reflecting Burrill's alphabetical arrangement of Law French and Latin terms together — a structure that itself requires researcher orientation, since terms from two different languages and legal traditions appear as neighbors without consistent flagging.
Burrill does not discuss the procedural context in which DETTOUR appears, nor does he trace the term's displacement by the English "debtor." Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary, both standard shelf references for Law French vocabulary, do not carry a separate entry for DETTOUR as distinct from their general treatment of debt-related terminology, though debt actions occupy substantial space in both works. No later standard legal dictionary — Black's in any edition, Bouvier's, Stroud's — carries the term, which is consistent with its purely historical character.
The 2 Bl. Com. 462 reference appearing in Burrill's adjacent DEUNX entry is a reminder that Blackstone himself engaged with Roman law fractional terminology in the same neighborhood of legal vocabulary, though that reference bears on property division rather than on debt or the identity of a debtor.