Definition
A concluding word or phrase formerly used in the administration of oaths, particularly in medieval and early English legal practice. "Eun" represents a contracted or anglicized rendering of the law French closing formula *Et ces saints* — meaning, roughly, "and these holy things" — which was spoken or acknowledged at the end of an oath, typically while the swearer touched sacred objects such as the Gospels or relics. The term belongs to the formal liturgical-legal vocabulary of oath-taking and has no operative significance in modern law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recognized as a standard English word in contemporary usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The word does not appear in Webster's 1913 as an independent English term.
The absence of any common-language foothold is itself instructive: "eun" survives almost exclusively as a fossil in legal-historical sources, stripped of the French phonology and orthography that gave it meaning. A researcher encountering it in a manuscript or early printed source may not recognize it as a French-derived formula at all.
Common Confusion
The term has been improperly rendered as "And the saints," which Burrill explicitly flags as an error. The law French *Et ces saints* refers more precisely to the holy objects — relics, scripture, or sacred instruments — upon which the oath was sworn, not to saints invoked as witnesses. The mistranslation matters because it shifts the theological and legal character of the oath: one formula invokes divine intercession through saints; the other confirms the physical solemnity of the act by reference to the sacred objects being touched. Early English legal writers occasionally conflated these, and the confusion recurs in secondary sources that borrowed uncritically from prior glossaries.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records, ecclesiastical court materials, or early common law treatises may encounter "eun" as a terminal marker in transcribed or summarized oaths. Its appearance signals that the document is recording oath language in a phonetically or orthographically degraded form — the kind of compression that occurred when law French formulas were copied by scribes whose first language was English or Latin.
The practical traps are two. First, the word may appear without context sufficient to identify it as an oath-concluding formula, causing the researcher to treat it as a proper noun, a place name, or an error. Second, reliance on the "And the saints" mistranslation can distort interpretation of the legal effect of the oath in question, particularly in ecclesiastical proceedings where the distinction between invoking saints and swearing on holy objects carried canonical significance.
Cross-reference to the entry for *Sancta* (cited by Burrill) and to *Oath* is essential for full context. The Fleta reference (*lib. 2, c. 63, § 12*) places the formula squarely in thirteenth-century English legal practice and is the primary authority Burrill cites; researchers tracing the term to source should consult Fleta directly rather than relying on the Burrill gloss alone.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal source for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill's treatment is brief but careful: he identifies the law French source (*Et ces saints*), cites Fleta as the authority, and explicitly corrects the mistranslation. This correction is the most substantively useful element of the entry.
No significant divergence among historical dictionaries is traceable for this term because it appears to have attracted little independent glossary attention outside Burrill. The term's rarity in legal dictionaries reflects its obsolescence: by the time systematic English legal lexicography was well underway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, oath formulas had been substantially reformed and the law French concluding phrases had dropped out of practice. What Burrill preserves is antiquarian but not merely decorative — it provides the connective tissue between surviving medieval oath texts and their proper interpretation.
Jurisdictional Note
The term and the oath formula it represents are specific to medieval English legal and ecclesiastical practice. No equivalent operative term survives in modern common law jurisdictions. Researchers in Scottish, Irish, or continental legal history should not assume the formula or its translation carries identical meaning across those traditions without independent verification.