Definition
An archaic Law French verb meaning "to go" or "to travel." In medieval legal usage, *errer* expressed movement or passage — appearing most prominently in phrases governing the travel or circuit of judges and officials. The term is not a substantive legal concept in its own right but a functional component of compound legal phrases drawn from the Law French procedural vocabulary of early English common law.
Common Confusion
ERRER and ERROR. The visual and phonetic similarity to the English word "error" (and its legal cognate, *error* as in writ of error) creates an immediate false association. The two terms are etymologically and functionally unrelated. *Errer* derives from a root meaning to travel or move; *error* in law derives from a Latin root meaning mistake or wandering from the correct path. A researcher encountering *errer* in a Law French text is reading about movement, not legal mistake.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law sources — Year Books, plea rolls, abridgments, or any text drawing on the Law French procedural tradition — need to recognize *errer* as a motion verb, not as a reference to legal error or the writ of error. Misreading it as a cognate of *error* can corrupt the interpretation of a passage entirely.
The term appears primarily in compound phrases and set formulas. Its most important context is in expressions governing judicial circuits and itinerant justices — the system by which royal justices traveled through the counties to hold court. Phrases built around *errer* frequently describe the authorization, route, or conduct of such travel. Researchers tracking the development of the eyre system, commissions of assize, and itinerant justice will encounter this term in foundational sources.
The inflected form *erra* (third person singular, past or conditional) and *shall* constructions suggest the term also appeared in directive or authorizing language — prescribing that a justice or official shall go to a particular place. This is consistent with the procedural character of Law French as used in writs, commissions, and records.
Because *errer* carries no independent doctrinal weight, it will not appear in indexes or finding aids as a subject heading. It is a word researchers stumble over in the course of reading primary sources rather than a term they search for. The risk is not that it will be missed as a concept, but that it will be misread as something else.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry: *errer* means "to go" (citing Kelham's *Norman French Dictionary*), with the inflected form *erra* glossed as "shall go." This is consistent with the structure of Law French as a working legal vernacular — terse, formulaic, and built for procedural documents rather than discursive prose.
Burrill's treatment is minimal, as befits a term that is grammatical rather than doctrinal. No substantive legal test or rule attaches to *errer* itself. The historical dictionaries covering Law French more broadly — Kelham being the principal dedicated source — treat it in the same way: a verb of movement whose significance is entirely contextual.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is guidance on which specific phrases or formulas most commonly employed *errer*, or a systematic account of how those phrases functioned within the legal documents where they appeared. Researchers will need to move from the dictionary identification of the term to primary sources and to scholarship on the eyre and assize systems to recover that fuller context.