Definition
An essoin — that is, an excuse for non-appearance in court — grounded on the claim that the party was detained in a town or place from which travel to court was impossible or impracticable. The phrase translates roughly from Law French as "essoin of the evil (or bad) town." It was one of several recognized categories of essoin in the old common law, by which a defendant or party could formally excuse their absence from a court day without forfeiting judgment by default.
Under the medieval common law system, appearance in court on the appointed day was a serious obligation, and failure to appear could result in immediate judgment against the absent party. Essoins provided a structured procedural remedy: a party unable to attend could send an essoiner to present the excuse in their place. The excuse had to fall within a recognized legal category, and essoin de malo ville was one such category, distinct from essoin de malo lecti (illness confining one to bed) or essoin ultra mare (absence beyond the sea).
The specific content of essoin de malo ville covered the situation where a party was present in some town or location but was unable to depart — whether because of flood, siege, broken roads, or other obstruction that rendered the route impassable. It was not a claim of illness but of physical impediment to travel.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern common law sources and is of practical relevance only when researching medieval English procedure, Year Books, early plea rolls, or treatises from Glanvill through Blackstone. Researchers encountering it in primary sources should be aware of two things.
First, the essoins system as a whole was abolished in England by the Common Law Procedure Act 1852, which swept away much of the archaic procedural scaffolding of the common law courts. Any appearance of this term in sources after the mid-nineteenth century is likely antiquarian, historical, or comparative in character.
Second, the term never took meaningful root in American practice. American courts shed the medieval essoin framework at an early stage, substituting statutory continuance and default procedures. A researcher finding the phrase in an American source is almost certainly looking at a doctrinal or historical treatise borrowing from English authorities, not a live procedural category.
Within the Law Mind corpus, this term connects most naturally to the broader family of essoin entries and to procedural sources dealing with appearance, default, and continuance in the common law courts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence give a compact entry defining essoin de malo ville as an essoin "where the party was in a town whence he could not come." The definition is accurate but minimal, as was typical of the digest-style treatment in that dictionary. They do not distinguish it sharply from related essoins or situate it within the broader procedural framework governing how essoins were received, challenged, or waived.
Older English authorities provide considerably more texture. Glanvill's twelfth-century treatise and Bracton's De Legibus both discuss the essoins system at length, and the Year Books contain numerous entries recording the formal presentation and contestation of essoins before royal justices. Blackstone's Commentaries treat essoins as part of the antique procedural apparatus of the common law, already somewhat vestigial by his era.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any adequate treatment of how essoin de malo ville was distinguished in practice from essoin de malo viae (essoin of the bad road or bad way), which some authorities treat as a distinct subcategory. The overlap between these two categories was a recurring source of procedural argument in the medieval courts. Researchers working with Year Book materials should be alert to this distinction, as the terms were not always used consistently.
Jurisdictional Note
Strictly an English common law procedural term. It was never formally adopted in American procedure and was abolished in England by statute in 1852. Its relevance is limited to historical and comparative legal research.