Definition
An obsolete Law French term meaning "to choose" or "to elect." In medieval English legal practice, *eslier* appears as the verb root underlying the noun *eslisors* (also written *esliors* or, more commonly, *elisors*) — the persons appointed to choose or select, most typically a jury or its members, when the ordinary process of jury selection could not proceed through the sheriff or coroner. The term itself rarely appears as a standalone legal noun; its significance in the historical record is primarily as the etymological foundation of *elisors*, which remained in use considerably longer.
Common Confusion
*Eslier*, *eslisors/esliors*, and *elisors* are easily conflated because they derive from the same root and appear in the same procedural contexts. The distinction matters for research purposes: *eslier* is the verb ("to choose"), while *eslisors* and *elisors* are the agents who perform that choosing. When reading Burrill or a primary source, confirming which form is actually present will determine whether the source is defining a process or identifying the persons who carry it out.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *eslier* in medieval or early English legal materials should treat it as a function word signaling a selection or appointment process rather than as the name of a legal office or doctrine in its own right. The term surfaces most reliably in close proximity to jury-selection procedure and to discussions of who held authority to empanel jurors when the sheriff was disqualified (as by interest or partiality) or otherwise unavailable.
The key navigational point: *eslier* and its variants are far less common in the corpus than the noun form *elisors*. A researcher who encounters *eslier* in a primary source is almost certainly working in Anglo-Norman or early Law French materials — most likely pre-Tudor. The spelling is unstable across manuscripts and printed abridgments. Burrill flags the form *eslieus/eslus* (past participle, "chosen") and *lew* alongside *eslier*, which means that word-search strategies in digitized historical corpora must account for these variant forms. Searching only for *eslier* will miss the participial forms that appear in the same procedural contexts.
The citation in Burrill to *22 Edw. I* (i.e., a statute or record from the reign of Edward I, circa 1293–1294) and to Britton (the late-thirteenth-century law treatise) anchors the term squarely in the late thirteenth century. Researchers using Year Books or plea rolls from that period are most likely to find it in active use. By the time of Coke and the common law reporters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Anglicized form *elisors* had largely displaced the Law French root in legal writing.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary historical source preserving this term for English-language legal research. Burrill's treatment is spare but precise: he identifies *eslier* as Law French for "to choose," gives the past-participial forms (*eslieus*, *eslus*, and *lew*), cross-references Britton (fol. 2, c. 10) and a record of 22 Edward I, and redirects the reader to *elisors* as the more commonly used form. No definition of *eslier* as an independent legal term of art appears — Burrill presents it essentially as a glossary entry for the root verb, not as a term with its own doctrinal content.
Other major historical dictionaries (Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's, Bouvier's) do not carry a dedicated entry for *eslier*, though several treat *elisors* at length. This gap confirms that *eslier* had no sustained independent life as a term of legal art in the common law tradition; its value in legal dictionaries is purely etymological and cross-referential.