Definition
An Old French (Law French) verb meaning "to send." In medieval legal usage, *envoyer* and its derived forms appear in procedural contexts: to send a person to prison, to summon a party to court, or more broadly to direct or transmit something by authority of law. The term is not a term of art in modern common law but survives as a traceable root in historical English legal records, particularly in Law French documents of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.
Derived forms appearing in historical sources include:
1. ENVOYE — past participle, "sent." Used in legal records to indicate that a person had been dispatched, typically to gaol or to a designated location by judicial or royal command.
2. ENVOYABLE — an adjectival form, appearing in Britton, suggesting a person or matter capable of being sent or subject to being remanded.
3. ROT. (rotuli) usage — in parliamentary records, the verb carries the specific procedural sense of summoning a party to appear before a court, equivalent to a command to attend.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): *Envoyer* is a standard Modern French verb meaning "to send." In everyday French, it is unremarkable — one sends a letter, a message, or a person somewhere.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not independently define *envoyer* as an English word, though *envoy* (the noun, denoting a diplomatic messenger or representative) derives from the same French root and appears as a standard English entry.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is primarily temporal and linguistic rather than semantic. The modern French *envoyer* and the Law French *envoyer* share the same core meaning — "to send" — but the legal significance lies in who is doing the sending and upon what authority. In Law French legal documents, *envoyer* is not a casual verb of transmission; it carries the weight of judicial or royal command, typically in the context of imprisonment or compelled appearance. Researchers reading historical legal records should not treat it as a neutral logistical term.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational marker for researchers working in Law French primary sources, particularly documents predating the gradual displacement of Law French by English in legal proceedings (roughly completed by the late seventeenth century, though specialized usage persisted longer in formal records).
Key research considerations:
First, *envoyer* and its forms will appear in original Latin-French hybrid legal manuscripts and printed transcriptions of the same. Britton — the late thirteenth-century legal treatise written in Law French — is a primary locus. Researchers using Britton must recognize that *envoyer* in context means a formal judicial act of remand or dispatch, not a general instruction to travel.
Second, the parliamentary roll citation (Rot. Parl. 4 Hen. IV) signals that the summoning sense of the verb has a specific procedural life in parliamentary process. Researchers tracing the history of judicial summons, contempt, or compelled appearance before legislative bodies should note this usage as a precursor to later English procedural vocabulary.
Third, researchers using full-text search tools in Law Mind's corpus should be alert to variant spellings and contracted forms common in manuscript tradition. *Envoie*, *envoié*, and related spellings may index separately from *envoyer* in some databases.
Fourth, *envoy* (the noun) in diplomatic and literary contexts is a direct descendant of this root but diverges entirely in legal significance. Do not conflate the diplomatic envoy with the procedural *envoyer* when tracing usage across centuries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive treatment in the Law Mind shelf. Burrill is appropriately economical: he defines the term, supplies the Law French root, and points to two chapters of Britton and one parliamentary roll reference. This is characteristic of Burrill's handling of Law French procedural vocabulary — identification and location rather than extended analysis.
What Burrill does not supply, and what modern researchers need to note, is any discussion of how *envoyer* relates to the parallel Latin vocabulary of remand and summons (e.g., *mittere*, *mandare*) that operated in the same documents and often in the same sentences. The Law French and Latin streams of medieval English legal records frequently interweave, and Burrill's entry, standing alone, may give the false impression that *envoyer* operated in a purely French-language procedural world.
No other historical dictionary on the Law Mind shelf independently treats *envoyer* as a legal term.
Jurisdictional Note
*Envoyer* as a legal term is specific to the English common law tradition in its Law French phase. It has no operative significance in modern American, Canadian, or English law except as a historical artifact. Researchers in civilian or mixed jurisdictions (Quebec, Louisiana) working with early French colonial legal records may encounter the verb in non-common-law procedural contexts, where interpretation would require different reference sources.