Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "fine" — that is, a monetary penalty or financial punishment imposed by a court or authority. The term appears in the phrase *prison et par feyn*, meaning "punished by imprisonment and by fine," indicating that feyn denoted the pecuniary component of a combined criminal or quasi-criminal sentence pairing incarceration with a financial exaction.
Why It Matters in Research
Feyn is a term encountered almost exclusively in very early Anglo-Norman and Law French legal sources. Researchers working with medieval English legal texts, particularly those predating the widespread adoption of Latin or Anglicized legal terminology, may encounter feyn in records relating to punishment, royal justice, or criminal proceedings. Its appearance is largely confined to a narrow stratum of the historical corpus — treatises and compilations from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including the Britton tradition. Researchers should not expect to find feyn in post-medieval case law or statutes; by the time English legal language had normalized, the term had been wholly displaced by "fine" in its English form. Cross-referencing feyn with the broader history of fines and amercements is essential, as medieval sources do not always draw clean distinctions between a fine (a fixed penalty), an amercement (a discretionary sum), and related exactions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source capturing this term for the anglophone legal research tradition. Burrill identifies feyn as Law French, traces it through the phrase *prison et par feyn* (punished by imprisonment and by fine), and anchors it to Britton, chapter 4 — a late thirteenth-century treatise on English law written in Law French and attributed (probably fictitiously) to John le Breton. The Britton text is one of the few surviving sources where this specific form appears, which explains why coverage in other historical dictionaries is absent or negligible. Burrill's entry, though brief, correctly situates feyn within the compound punishment framework common to early criminal proceedings, where monetary and custodial penalties were regularly paired. No significant divergence or elaboration appears across other dictionary sources, as this is a term of sufficiently narrow usage that broader coverage was never warranted.
Jurisdictional Note
Feyn as a legal term is specific to the early English common law tradition and its Law French documentary inheritance. It has no operative meaning in any modern jurisdiction and carries no relevance to Scottish, continental, or American legal sources.