Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "to go out of" or "to issue." In medieval English legal usage, *eissir* expressed the concept of departure, exit, or issuance — the act of something going forth from a place, person, or authority. The term appears in early common law texts and pleading records where Law French was the operative language of English courts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *eissir* will find it almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources — Year Books, early plea rolls, and treatises composed in or translating from Law French. The term belongs to a family of Law French vocabulary that persisted in English court practice from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century, when Law French was formally abolished as a language of pleading (1650s under the Commonwealth, with fuller elimination by later statute).
The practical trap: *eissir* is a root or verbal form, and researchers may encounter it in compound or conjugated constructions without recognizing it. Its conceptual descendants — *issue*, *issuer*, and related procedural terms in English — carry the same core meaning of "going out" or "flowing from," but those English terms accumulated distinct technical legal meanings that *eissir* alone did not carry. Do not read later doctrinal content about *issue* (as in, the issue of a writ, or issue joined in pleading) back into passages where *eissir* appears. The Law French usage is typically more literal.
This term is of limited standalone doctrinal significance. Its research value lies in translation and comprehension of primary sources, not in tracing a legal doctrine. Burrill records it on the authority of Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779), which remains a key reference for Law French vocabulary in English legal records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry concisely: "L. Fr. To go out of; to issue. Kelham." This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Law French terms — definitional rather than doctrinal, relying on Kelham as the philological authority rather than on case law. No further elaboration appears in Burrill, which itself signals that *eissir* was recognized as a linguistic artifact rather than a term with active doctrinal life at the time Burrill compiled his dictionary.
Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779) is the underlying authority here and is the appropriate source to consult for fuller linguistic context, variant spellings, and illustrative passages from Year Books. Researchers working heavily in Law French legal records should treat Kelham as a primary philological reference alongside Burrill.
No divergence exists among the historical sources for this term because only one source in the Law Mind corpus addresses it. The absence of the term from other historical law dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's, Jacob's) further confirms its status as a specialist Law French term without a durable common law doctrinal footprint.