Definition
An obsolete Law French term denoting a bishopric — that is, the territorial jurisdiction, office, and ecclesiastical estate held by a bishop. In medieval legal usage, the evesquery encompassed both the spiritual authority of the bishop and the temporal properties and revenues annexed to that office. The term appears in contexts involving the legal status of ecclesiastical holdings, particularly questions of tenure, wardship, and the rights of the Crown during vacancies.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources, particularly materials touching on the intersection of canon law and common law. The primary trap is unfamiliarity: evesquery is easily misread or passed over as a scribal variant or copying error when encountered in manuscript or early printed sources. Because it is Law French, it appears in Year Books, early plea rolls, and treatises of the feudal period, where the ecclesiastical and temporal dimensions of a bishop's estate were legally significant — especially regarding the Crown's right to administer the diocese during vacancies (a practice giving rise to considerable litigation and statutory regulation).
The single Littleton reference (sect. 651) anchors the term in property and tenure doctrine. Researchers working on church property, advowson, or the feudal incidents attaching to ecclesiastical offices should treat this term as a signal that the surrounding text concerns episcopal landholding in its legal rather than purely spiritual dimension. Sources treating evesquery will rarely appear in post-seventeenth-century materials; after the Restoration and the gradual standardization of legal English, Law French terms of this type fell out of active legal use.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only historical dictionary entry identified for this term, and it is spare: a bare translation ("a bishopric") with a single citation to Littleton's Tenures, section 651. Burrill offers no further doctrinal context, no discussion of the incidents attaching to a bishopric as a legal estate, and no indication of how the term functioned within the broader vocabulary of ecclesiastical tenure. The entry is definitionally accurate but analytically minimal. Researchers should not treat the Burrill entry as a guide to the legal significance of the concept — only to its translation. The absence of this term from other major historical legal dictionaries (Tomlin, Jacob, Bouvier) suggests it was already archaic or specialized by the time those compilations were produced. Its primary documentary habitat is pre-modern sources where Law French remained the language of legal record.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the English legal tradition and its ecclesiastical property law. It has no recognized counterpart in American law, Scots law, or civilian systems. Researchers in Commonwealth jurisdictions may encounter it in historical materials tracing the descent of church property from medieval tenure arrangements.