EWBRICE - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

EWBRICEAuthored

The Law Mind • 600 words

Definition

An archaic English legal term meaning adultery—specifically, the breach of the marriage bond. The word was used in early English law to describe the offense of extramarital sexual intercourse, characterized as a violation of the matrimonial covenant.

Common Confusion

EWBRICE should not be confused with the modern legal term ADULTERY, though they are synonymous in meaning. The distinction is purely historical and terminological: ADULTERY is the operative term in all modern legal systems; EWBRICE is an antiquarian form preserved only in historical legal dictionaries and glossaries. A researcher encountering EWBRICE in a source is not reading about a distinct or more specific offense—the terms describe the same conduct.

Why It Matters in Research

Researchers encountering EWBRICE will find it almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources and historical glossaries. The term does not appear in modern statutory or case law and carries no operative legal force today. Its significance is taxonomic: it signals that a document or source dates from, or draws upon, early English ecclesiastical and common law traditions in which adultery was treated as a distinct legal wrong with its own vocabulary.

Researchers working in ecclesiastical court records, early canon law materials, or antiquarian legal compilations should recognize EWBRICE as a functional synonym for adultery in those contexts. It will not appear in American legal materials as a term of art, though the underlying concept—adultery as a matrimonial offense—persists in modern family law under that name.

The term is a useful marker for cross-referencing: if it appears in a source, that source is almost certainly drawing from Cowell's Interpreter, Blount's Nomo-Lexikon, or Tomlins's Law Dictionary, all of which preserve this Old English vocabulary. Researchers tracing the lineage of a legal glossary or identifying a document's likely source tradition should note these dictionary attributions.

Historical Dictionary Support

All five source dictionaries agree on the definition: adultery, spouse-breach, or marriage-breach. The sources also agree on attribution, consistently citing Cowell and Tomlins (and, in some editions, Blount) as the authoritative references. There is no meaningful divergence among the historical dictionaries on meaning or usage.

Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most useful etymological grounding, tracing the word to Saxon roots: ew (marriage) and brice or bryce (a breach). This etymology clarifies why the term was sometimes rendered as "spouse-breach" or "marriage-breach" in English—these are direct translations of the compound's component parts, not distinct legal concepts.

Rapalje & Lawrence cites Jacob's Law Dictionary as an additional authority, indicating the term circulated through multiple layers of English legal lexicography. None of the historical dictionaries situate EWBRICE within a procedural or remedial framework, which suggests it functioned as a descriptive label rather than a term with attached legal consequences in the sources that preserved it. What those consequences were—and in which courts adultery was cognizable—is not addressed by the dictionary tradition and must be sought elsewhere.

EWBRICEmain

Black's Law Dictionary • 1891

denominated "slight evidence." Code Civil Proc. Cal. § 1835. Conclusive evidence. Conclusive or un- answerable evidence is that which the law does not permit to be contradicted; for ex- ample, the record of a court of competent ju- risdiction cannot be contradicted by the par- ties to it. Code Civil Proc. Cal. § 1837. Indispensable evidence is that without which a particular fact cannot be proved. Code Civil Proc. Cal. § 1836. Documentary evidence is that derived from conventional symbols (such as letters) by which ideas are represented on material sub- stances. Hearsay evidence is the evidence, not of what the witness knows himself, but of what he has heard from others. In respect to its object, evidence is of the following several kinds: Substantive evidence is that adduced for the purpose of proving a fact in issue, as op- posed to evidence given for the purpose of discrediting a witness, (i. e., showing that be is unworthy of belief,) or of corroborating his testimony. Best, Ev. 246, 773, 803. Corroborative evidence is additional evi dence of a different character to the same point. Code Civil Proc. Cal. § 1839. Cumulative evidence is additional evidence of the same character to the same point. Civil Code Proc. Cal. § 1838.