Definition
An archaic Law French numeral term meaning "two hundred." Encountered in medieval English legal manuscripts and records where Law French served as the operative language of pleading and court documentation. The term appears in enumeration contexts — counting jurors, parcels, monetary sums, marks, acres, or other quantities where a figure of two hundred required expression in the Law French register.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records — Year Books, plea rolls, early chancery documents, or manorial court rolls — may encounter DUSCENS in contexts where a numerical value governs the legal outcome: a debt of two hundred marks, a grant of two hundred acres, a penalty of two hundred shillings. Misreading or failing to recognize the term produces a transcription error that corrupts the legal or factual substance of the document entirely.
The practical research trap is that Law French numerals are not consistently glossed in modern editions of early legal records. Editors who translate narrative terms may leave numerals in their original Law French form without annotation, on the assumption that the numeral is self-evident to the specialist reader. That assumption does not hold for researchers approaching these materials from outside the paleographic tradition.
Note also the entry immediately following in Burrill: DUSESME / DUZIM, meaning "twelfth." The proximity of these two terms in the Law French numeral system means they may appear in close succession in the same document — for instance, in a date formula ("the twelfth day of [month], in the two hundredth year...") or in a partition of shares. Keeping the two terms distinct is a basic accuracy requirement.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term, recording it with attribution to Kelham's *Repertorium Clericale* (Robert Kelham, *A Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language*, 1779), the standard reference for Law French vocabulary in the Burrill period. Burrill's entry is minimal — a single line equating DUSCENS with "two hundred" — which is appropriate for a numeral term carrying no independent legal doctrine.
No substantive disagreement or elaboration is possible across the historical dictionaries because the term's meaning is fixed and non-doctrinal. The research value of the Burrill entry lies not in analysis but in identification: it confirms that this spelling variant was recognized as a standard Law French form, distinguishing it from possible scribal variants or corruption.
Researchers should be aware that Kelham's original work remains the deeper reference for Law French numeral forms and their variant spellings across manuscript traditions. Burrill's entry is a derivative pointer, not an independent source.