Definition
An archaic Law French term for the month of February. Used in historical legal instruments, pleadings, and records written in the Law French conventions common to English legal practice before the formal abolition of Law French in court proceedings.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal records — particularly plea rolls, year books, chancery records, and private instruments dating from the Norman period through the seventeenth century — will encounter Law French date conventions. FEVEREZ is the Law French rendering of February and will appear in document dating clauses, return dates, and term references. Misreading or failing to recognize the word can cause a researcher to misdates a document entirely or fail to locate it within the correct legal term.
Law French was not abolished in English court proceedings until 1731 (4 Geo. II, c. 26), meaning documents predating that reform may freely employ FEVEREZ and related month-name variants. Even after abolition, antiquarian legal writing and some conveyancing practice preserved archaic forms. A researcher should not assume that a document using Law French month names is necessarily medieval; the practice persisted well into the early modern period.
The phrase noted by Burrill — "per sodden" — appears to be a fragment of a longer usage or contextual example from Kelham's dictionary of Norman French. Researchers should consult Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779) directly for the fuller phrase and its procedural context, as Burrill's entry is conspicuously truncated and may reflect an incomplete transcription or an editorial abbreviation.
Month names in Law French often appear in abbreviated form in manuscript sources. Variants and contractions of FEVEREZ may include "Feverer," "Fevrier," and similar spellings reflecting the instability of Norman French orthography across regions and periods. Researchers should not treat any single spelling as canonical when searching manuscript indices or calendars.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides only a brief entry: the term is identified as Law French for February, with attribution to Kelham. The truncated phrase "per sodden" accompanying the entry is unexplained and may refer to a specific procedural context (possibly a return date or a process returnable in February) that Burrill does not develop. This is a case where Burrill functions as a pointer to a primary source rather than as a self-sufficient authority. Researchers should treat the Burrill entry as a finding aid directing them to Kelham rather than as a complete definition.
No other Law Mind shelf sources include this term, which is consistent with its status as a peripheral vocabulary item — a calendar word rather than a legal concept — that later dictionaries dropped as Law French fell out of use.