Definition
A feisor (also spelled feisour, plural feisours) is an Anglo-French legal term meaning a doer, actor, or one who performs an act. In its primary legal sense, the term denotes a person who commits a criminal act — an offender or wrongdoer. In a secondary sense, feisours (plural) was used to mean makers or those who bring something into being, as in drafters or authors of a legal instrument.
The term appears principally in Year Book sources from the early fourteenth century and belongs to the technical vocabulary of Law French that dominated English legal pleading and reporting during the medieval and early common law period.
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Common Confusion
Feisor should not be confused with feoffor, which is the party who grants a freehold estate by feoffment. The visual and phonetic similarity between feisor and feoffor in manuscript and early printed sources has occasionally produced misreadings. A feisor is an actor or offender; a feoffor is a grantor of land. The two terms occupy entirely different legal domains.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Year Book sources, early plea rolls, or treatises written in Law French will encounter feisor and feisours in contexts that require careful disambiguation. Two distinct meanings operate simultaneously: the singular (feisor as wrongdoer) and the plural (feisours as makers or drafters), and the surrounding context is the only reliable guide to which sense is intended.
The term is essentially extinct in modern legal usage. It does not survive in contemporary statutes, judicial opinions, or pleading practice. Researchers should treat it as a terminus technicus of medieval English law, relevant when reading primary sources from roughly the late thirteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries — the core Year Book period.
Because Law French vocabulary was often imprecisely transcribed and variably spelled across manuscripts and early printed editions, variant spellings (feisour, faisour, fesour) may appear without cross-referencing in older indices. Searches limited to a single spelling may miss relevant passages.
The plural sense — feisours as makers — appears in contexts involving the drafters or enactors of statutes and ordinances, which gives it a distinct institutional flavor beyond mere agency in tort or crime. This distinction matters when reading legislative history from the medieval period: feisours in that context refers to Parliament or its committees as the makers of law, not to criminal actors.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source for this term, and its entry is spare but precise. Burrill gives the Law French root directly (a doer; an actor; one who does a criminal act; an offender) and cites the Year Books of Edward III's reign as authority — specifically references to Yearb. Add. T. 2 Edw. III. For the plural feisours as makers, Burrill credits Kelham's dictionary of Law French terms, a standard secondary authority on the Norman-French vocabulary of the early common law.
No broader synthesis across competing historical dictionaries is available for this entry, as the term does not appear to receive treatment in Bouvier, Black's early editions, or other standard Anglo-American law dictionaries of the nineteenth century — a further indicator that the term had already passed out of active legal use well before those works were compiled. The absence from later dictionaries is itself a research data point: it marks feisor as belonging to an earlier stratum of legal vocabulary that modern reference works largely absorbed into plainer English equivalents (offender, perpetrator, maker, drafter).
Kelham's glossary of Law French remains the best secondary tool for tracing the plural sense and its variants.
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Jurisdictional Note
Feisor is exclusively a term of English legal history. It has no independent development in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions and would not be encountered outside English medieval primary sources and the scholarship that engages them directly.
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