Definition
A Law French term meaning "ought." Used in archaic legal formulae to express obligation or duty, particularly in procedural contexts. The phrase *dey apper* means "ought to appear," used in early common law pleading and practice to describe a party's obligation to attend court or respond to process.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The tenth solar month of the Persian calendar.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A servant who has charge of the dairy; a dairymaid. [Obs.]
Neither the Persian calendar month nor the obsolete dairymaid sense has any connection to the legal term. The legal *dey* is a Law French word, phonetically and orthographically similar to modern English words but drawn entirely from the Norman French legal vocabulary of medieval England. A researcher encountering *dey* in an early legal text should not assume any relation to common English usage.
Common Confusion
*Dey* should not be confused with *dei* (Latin genitive of *deus*, "of God," appearing in phrases like *dei gratia*) or with *day* in its ordinary English procedural sense (as in "day in court"). In manuscript and early printed sources, the spellings *dey*, *doit*, and *doit* could appear in proximity, and abbreviation marks may further obscure the intended word. Context — particularly surrounding procedural language — is the most reliable guide to identifying *dey* as the Law French modal auxiliary.
Why It Matters in Research
*Dey* appears almost exclusively in very early common law sources — Year Books, Norman-period plea rolls, and treatises drawing on Law French procedural vocabulary. It is not a term that persisted into modern legal usage and will not appear in post-medieval statutes or equity practice in recognizable form. Researchers working in Law Mind's corpus of historical English legal materials should be alert to the following:
First, *dey apper* and similar phrases appear in formulaic procedural passages. The term signals an obligation imposed by the court or by procedural rule, not a voluntary undertaking. This distinction matters when interpreting the consequence of non-compliance described nearby in the source.
Second, the citation in Burrill to *Fet Assaver* (also rendered *Fet Assaver de Novel Disseisin*, a treatise on novel disseisin procedure) places *dey* firmly within the assizes and real property procedure of early English law. Researchers tracing the procedural history of appearance obligations, default, and contempt should treat *dey apper* as an ancestor concept to later appearance requirements.
Third, because Law French terms were often rendered inconsistently by copyists and early printers, variant spellings in the corpus are likely. Searching for *dey* alone may miss instances spelled *dei*, *deit*, or abbreviated with a superscript mark. Broad search strategies are advisable.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this term. His entry is spare — three words of definition plus a single supporting citation — which accurately reflects how little discursive explanation the term requires. It is a functional word, a modal auxiliary, not a substantive legal concept with contested meaning or doctrinal weight.
No other major historical legal dictionary in the standard shelf (Black's, Bouvier, Tomlin's, Jacob's) carries a discrete entry for *dey* as a Law French term, which itself signals the word's limited circulation outside the earliest stratum of common law sources. Burrill's inclusion reflects his broader and more systematic attention to Law French and Latin vocabulary than later American dictionaries provided.
The *Fet Assaver* citation Burrill supplies is genuine: the treatise is a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman text on the assize of novel disseisin, and procedural appearance language of this kind is consistent with that source's subject matter and period.
Jurisdictional Note
Purely historical English common law usage. No American, Commonwealth, or civil law jurisdiction employs *dey* as an active legal term. Its relevance is confined to research in medieval and early modern English legal sources.