Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "before his time" or "before one's hours." Used in historical legal proceedings to indicate that something occurred before a specified time, or heretofore — that is, prior to the present moment or prior to the occasion under consideration. The phrase functioned as a temporal marker in pleading and argument, signaling that an event, condition, or legal status predated the matter at hand.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is purely a relic of Law French legal usage and will appear only in medieval and early modern Year Book materials and the historical treatises that draw on them. Researchers encountering it in primary sources from the Year Books — particularly those of the Henrician period — should understand it as a conventional adverbial phrase rather than a term of art carrying substantive legal weight. It did not denote a distinct legal doctrine or procedural mechanism; it was a temporal qualifier embedded in oral and written pleading.
The single citation in Burrill — Yearb. M. 11 Hen. VI. 28 — points to the Michaelmas term of the eleventh year of Henry VI's reign, roughly 1432–1433. Year Book references of this kind require care: Year Book pagination and organization vary across printed editions, and the same passage may appear differently across the Rolls Series reprints, the Maynard edition, and other compilations. Researchers should verify the edition in hand before treating the citation as a precise locator.
Because Law French was the dominant pleading language of the English common law courts from the Norman period through the seventeenth century — formally abolished for most purposes by the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730 — phrases like devant ses heures appear densely throughout the Year Books and early abridgments. A researcher working in that corpus should treat such phrases as requiring translation rather than legal interpretation; the legal content lies in the surrounding pleading, not in the phrase itself.
There is no modern usage of this term. It will not appear in contemporary statutes, regulations, or case law. Its research relevance is confined entirely to historical legal sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive entry among standard historical legal dictionaries. Burrill translates the phrase as "before this time; heretofore" and anchors it with the Year Book citation. The entry is deliberately spare — appropriately so, given that the phrase carried no technical legal meaning requiring extended glossing. It was a piece of the Law French working vocabulary, not a term of doctrine.
Tomlin's Law Dictionary, Jacob's Law Dictionary, and Bouvier's Law Dictionary do not appear to carry a dedicated entry for this phrase, which underscores its status as routine Law French diction rather than a term of legal art warranting its own definition. The absence of broader coverage in the historical dictionary record is itself instructive: the phrase was common enough to warrant inclusion in a comprehensive Law French glossary like Burrill's, but not significant enough doctrinally to attract independent treatment in the major Anglophone dictionaries.