Definition
A Law French term meaning "doubled," "repeated," or "duplicate." In historical legal usage, dublee describes something that has been doubled or duplicated in form, quantity, or effect — most commonly encountered in medieval and early modern English legal instruments and pleading records where Law French terminology remained in formal use.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal records — particularly plea rolls, Year Books, and chancery documents from the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries — will encounter Law French vocabulary that was never systematically replaced by English equivalents. Dublee is a term of that class: it survived in specialized technical contexts long enough to appear in legal dictionaries but left little trace in modern legal doctrine.
The primary research trap is mistaking dublee for a substantive legal category with doctrinal weight. It is a descriptive modifier, not a term of art carrying its own legal consequences. Its significance in a given document depends entirely on what it is modifying — a writ, a payment, a penalty, a record entry. A researcher who encounters the term should look immediately to the noun or instrument being described rather than treating dublee itself as the operative concept.
Because the term appears almost exclusively in historical sources, it is largely invisible to modern legal research databases and full-text search tools that index contemporary materials. Researchers working in digitized manuscript collections or transcribed plea rolls should note that Law French terms are frequently inconsistent in spelling across manuscripts, and variant forms — doublee, doublé, doblé — may appear in the same archival collection.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary treatment located in the Law Mind corpus. The entry is brief: "Doubled; repeated; duplicate," with attribution to Kelham's Normand Dictionary. This is consistent with the general treatment of Law French vocabulary in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries, which typically recorded such terms for completeness without elaborating their practical significance.
The attribution to Kelham (Robert Kelham, A Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language, 1779) is notable. Kelham's dictionary was one of the primary reference works for practitioners and antiquarians attempting to interpret medieval English legal records, and Burrill's reliance on it signals that dublee was understood as a term of historical record rather than living legal usage even by the mid-nineteenth century.
No treatment of dublee appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Black's Law Dictionary, which suggests the term had fallen out of active legal vocabulary well before those works were compiled in their most influential editions. Researchers should not expect to find the term in general-purpose legal dictionaries predating or postdating Burrill.