Definition
A Law French term meaning "twelve" or, in legal context, "a person twelve years of age." The term appears in medieval English statutory law in connection with age thresholds, particularly under the Statute of 18 Edward II, where the age of twelve carried legal significance for certain proceedings or obligations.
Common Confusion
Dozein should not be confused with terms relating to the jury of twelve (as in the twelve members of a petty jury). The superficial resemblance to the English word "dozen" may suggest a connection to jury composition, but the historical sources are unambiguous: the legal use of dozein in the corpus is age-specific, not structural. The related Burrill variants — Dozyme, Dozime, Dozine — are spelling variants only, not distinct legal concepts.
Why It Matters in Research
Dozein is a relic term encountered almost exclusively in transcriptions of medieval English statutes and early common law commentaries. Researchers are unlikely to find it in modern legal sources; its practical relevance is confined to reading and interpreting Law French materials predating the gradual displacement of Law French from English legal writing, a process substantially complete by the eighteenth century.
The key navigational point: dozein appears in the corpus primarily as a number (twelve) or as a shorthand for a person of that age. Researchers working with 18 Edward II or surrounding statutes should be alert to the dual meaning. The term is not an independent legal status or doctrine — it is descriptive, marking an age threshold within the statute's operative text. Misreading it as referring to a jury of twelve (a natural false cognate with "dozen") would be an error; the historical dictionaries uniformly gloss it as referring to age, not to a deliberative body.
Burrill's entry usefully connects dozein to related Law French variants — Dozyme, Dozime, and Dozine — suggesting that spelling was highly unstable in manuscript sources. Researchers consulting original or early printed texts of Edward II-era statutes should expect orthographic variation and not treat differing spellings as distinct terms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: dozein means twelve, specifically a person of twelve years. All three sources cite the same authority — Statute 18 Edward II — and the same secondary reference to Daines Barrington's Observations on the More Ancient Statutes (the work cited as "Barring. Ob. St." or "Barringt. Obs. Stat."). This uniform citation chain suggests that the term's recorded legal usage was narrow and that the dictionaries are all drawing from the same analytical tradition rather than independently verified usage across multiple sources.
Black's first edition includes an anomalous phrase at the close of its entry — "of discussion and correction, and which is afterwards to be copied out in its final shape" — which is almost certainly a printing or transcription artifact, likely text bleed from an adjacent entry, and carries no interpretive weight for dozein itself.
None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on the legal consequences that attached to reaching the age of twelve under 18 Edward II, nor do they situate the term within the broader medieval framework of age-based legal capacity. Researchers needing that context should look beyond the dictionary record to treatises on medieval English legal history and age-of-majority doctrine.