Definition
An archaic Law French term with two related but distinct procedural meanings: (1) to remove or eloign — that is, to carry away, conceal, or place beyond the reach of legal process; and (2) to put off or adjourn a proceeding. Both senses share a common thread: the act of placing something — a person, property, or legal matter — at a distance from its proper legal situation.
Common Confusion
ESLOIGNER / ELOIGN / ELOIGNMENT: These three forms are variants of the same underlying concept. Esloigner is the Law French verb form; eloign is the anglicized verb; eloignment is the noun designating the act or result. Researchers encountering any of these forms in historical sources are looking at the same legal idea. The confusion arises because the spelling varies significantly across manuscripts and printed sources, and because the term's two distinct meanings — concealment of property or persons versus adjournment of proceedings — are not always clearly distinguished by historical writers. A reader must determine from context whether a source is describing an act of concealment (typically arising in connection with writs of replevin or habeas corpus) or a simple procedural continuance.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely a historical artifact. Researchers will encounter esloigner only in older English legal materials — Year Books, Abridgments, early common law treatises, and the occasional colonial American source — and rarely if ever in modern practice or modern judicial opinions. Two research traps deserve attention.
First, the spelling problem is severe. Law French orthography was never standardized, and the same term appears in sources as esloigner, esloiner, eloigner, eloiner, and related forms. Full-text searching on any single spelling will miss a substantial portion of occurrences. Researchers working through the Law Mind corpus should treat all of these as equivalent terms and search accordingly.
Second, the dual meaning creates interpretive risk. The more legally significant sense — concealment of property or persons to defeat a writ — connects directly to the law of replevin and to the writ de proprietate probanda. When a defendant in a replevin action removed the distrained goods beyond the county, the plaintiff could pursue a writ of eloignment to address that removal. This procedural consequence is the substantive legal content of the term. The adjournment sense, by contrast, is a thinner procedural usage that carries little independent doctrinal weight.
Researchers tracing the history of replevin, distress, or the mechanics of medieval and early modern English civil process will find esloigner appearing as a node connecting those bodies of law. It is also a term that illuminates how Law French vocabulary functioned in English legal practice: a French verbal form retained in English legal texts long after ordinary legal discourse had moved to English, precisely because it carried specific technical meaning within an established procedural framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source available for this term, and its entry is characteristically concise: it identifies the term as Law French, defines it by reference to "eloign" (directing the reader to that entry), and adds the adjournment sense with attribution to Kelham's glossary of Norman French. This cross-reference structure — typical of Burrill — means that the full doctrinal content of esloigner is distributed across multiple entries rather than consolidated in one place. Researchers relying on Burrill for this term must follow the eloign cross-reference to recover the complete picture.
Kelham's Glossary of Norman and Old French Words, the source Burrill cites for the adjournment sense, is a useful corroborating reference for Law French vocabulary generally, though it is more a philological resource than a legal one. The limitation of both sources is that neither provides procedural context — neither explains when or why a court would record an esloignment, or what legal consequences followed. For that operational content, researchers must look to treatises on replevin and distress, or to primary sources in the Year Books.
Jurisdictional Note
Esloigner is a term of English common law origin. American legal sources may carry it into early colonial and post-colonial materials that borrowed heavily from English common law forms, but it did not develop independent American usage. It has no meaningful presence in civil law jurisdictions.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: ELOIGN; REPLEVIN; DISTRESS