Definition
An Anglo-French legal term meaning a doer, actor, or perpetrator — particularly the person who commits a crime or wrongful act. Derived from the Old French *faire* (to do), the term appears in medieval English legal texts to identify the active agent of an offense or nuisance. It carries no technical meaning distinct from its plain sense: the one who does the thing in question.
Common Language
This is pure legal jargon of the Anglo-French tradition. The term has no modern common English counterpart and does not appear in contemporary general usage. No Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 entry applies.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *fesour* will find it almost exclusively in early English legal texts written in Law French — the hybrid legal dialect used in English courts from roughly the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. It appears in sources like Britton, the thirteenth-century treatise on English law, where it identifies participants in criminal acts (*les principals fesours* — the principal actors) and the persons responsible for nuisances (*fesours de teles noysaunce* — the makers of such nuisance).
The practical research trap is transliteration and spelling variation. Law French terms were never standardized, and *fesour* may appear as *fesor*, *faiseur*, *faisour*, or other variants depending on the manuscript, edition, or copyist. When searching digitized or transcribed primary sources, researchers should run multiple spelling variants and not rely on a single form.
The term also functions as a component in compound phrases rather than as a standalone charge or cause of action. Its significance is almost always contextual — who the *fesour* is matters because it determines criminal or civil liability, but the term itself is a descriptor, not a legal category with attached elements or doctrine. Researchers looking for the substantive law will need to follow the surrounding passage rather than the word itself.
*Fesour* belongs to the larger vocabulary of Law French that shaped early common law pleading. Familiarity with this register is essential for anyone working with Year Books, early plea rolls, or treatises predating the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731, which ended the official use of Law French in English courts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source here and gives the essential information: the Law French derivation from *faire*, the translation as "doer" or "actor," and two illustrative phrases drawn from Britton. Burrill quotes Britton chapter 5 for *les principals fesours* and chapter 20 for *fesours de teles noysaunce*, grounding the term in a specific, identifiable medieval source.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus carry a dedicated entry for *fesour*, which itself signals the term's narrow compass — it was recognized as vocabulary to be glossed rather than doctrine to be analyzed. Burrill's treatment is complete for the term's limited purpose.
Researchers should note that Burrill's entry runs together the definition of *fesour* with the maxim *Festinatio justitiae est noverca infortunii* (a separate entry on the hasty administration of justice), and the printed text breaks mid-sentence in the transcribed source material. This is an artifact of the dictionary's original typesetting, not a gap in the definition of *fesour* itself.