Definition
To pay. A term drawn from Law French, used in early English statutory and pleading contexts to denote the act of making payment, particularly in the context of costs or financial obligations imposed by or arising from legal proceedings.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering ESCOTER will find it almost exclusively in medieval English legal texts and in sources that quote or annotate those texts directly. Its appearance in Westm. 1 (the First Statute of Westminster, 1275) reflects the heavy Law French vocabulary that dominates English statutory drafting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A researcher working through early printed abridgments, Year Books, or annotated editions of the Statutes of the Realm should treat the term as a functional synonym for "to pay" or "to bear the cost of," but must read the surrounding provision carefully: the precise obligation being triggered — whether a costs award, a penalty, or a debt — will not be apparent from the word itself.
Because ESCOTER has no continuing life in modern legal vocabulary, it will not appear in post-medieval case reporters or treatises except as a historical gloss. The practical research risk is misreading a transcription: older printed sources sometimes render Law French inconsistently, and variant spellings (escoter, escouter, escoutter) may appear depending on the manuscript tradition or the editor's hand. When searching digitized corpus materials, run variants before concluding a term is absent.
The word's single appearance in Burrill anchored to Westm. 1 c. 18 is a useful navigation point. That chapter addresses amercements and costs in certain actions, so ESCOTER in that context carries the specific sense of satisfying a financial imposition rather than paying a debt in a commercial sense.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives the full extent of this term's coverage in the standard historical shelf sources: a bare two-word gloss ("To pay") with a single statutory citation. No elaboration is offered on the range of obligations the term could govern, nor on whether it carried any technical coloring beyond its ordinary meaning. Black's Law Dictionary (early editions) does not appear to carry the term independently, and Bouvier's Law Dictionary likewise omits it, which confirms that ESCOTER had no recognized life in American legal usage and was treated even by nineteenth-century lexicographers as a curiosity of English antiquarian law rather than a working term.
The Westm. 1 citation is the term's primary anchor in the record. Researchers who need the authoritative text should consult the Statutes of the Realm (Record Commission edition) rather than relying on abridged or paraphrased versions, which may substitute "pay" or "satisfy" for the original Law French without flagging the substitution.
Jurisdictional Note
ESCOTER is a term of English law with no independent American reception. It does not appear in colonial or early republic legal usage, and no American jurisdiction has treated it as a term of art. Research encounters with the word are confined to English sources predating the displacement of Law French from legal drafting, generally the period before the seventeenth century.