Definition
In historical legal usage, FOUNT is a Law French verbal form meaning "they do," "they did," or "they make." It appears in early English legal records and pleading texts as a conjugated form of the verb faire (to do, to make), used in formulaic phrases to describe what parties do or fail to do in a legal proceeding. The term is not in active modern legal use and survives only in historical documents, particularly in the records and procedural texts of the medieval English common law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A natural source of water; a spring. A device from which poultry may drink. More broadly, that from which something proceeds; an origin or source.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A font; a fountain.
The gap here is almost total. In common English, past and present, "fount" is a noun denoting a source of water or origin of something. In historical legal usage it is a conjugated verb in Law French, grammatically and functionally unrelated to the English noun. A researcher encountering "fount" in a medieval English plea roll is reading a verb, not a metaphor about origins.
Why It Matters in Research
This term illustrates one of the core traps of Law French research: a word that looks English is functioning as French. A researcher who encounters "fount" in a historical document and reads it as English — as in "the fount of authority" or "fount of rights" — will misread the passage entirely. The word is performing a grammatical role in a Law French clause, indicating what a party or parties do or did.
The key phrase preserved in Burrill is "que fount defaute" — who make default — drawn from Fet Assaver, a medieval formulary text governing procedural duties. Researchers working in early common law pleading records, assize rolls, or procedural texts from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries should treat any instance of "fount" preceded by "que" as Law French verbal conjugation rather than English vocabulary.
In the Law Mind corpus, this term connects directly to research on default, pleading formulas, and Law French procedural language. Because Law French was the working language of English courts for several centuries, its verb forms appear without translation in many original records. Burrill is one of the few reference sources to capture this usage explicitly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical legal dictionary entry for this term in the Law Mind corpus, and its treatment is brief but precise. Burrill identifies "fount" as a Law French form derived from faire, provides the grammatical context (they do/make), and anchors it with the phrase "que fount defaute" from Fet Assaver, § 19. This is sufficient for identification purposes but offers no extended discussion of the term's frequency or range of uses in the historical record.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — including Bouvier, Black, or Tomlin — carry an entry for this term, which reflects both its narrow technical function and its obsolescence after Law French faded from English court practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The absence of coverage in later dictionaries is itself informative: the term had no life outside of archaic pleading and was not carried forward into modern legal vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the historical English common law tradition and its procedural records. It has no presence in civil law systems, Scottish law, or American legal usage. Researchers working in colonial American records occasionally encounter Law French survivals, but "fount" in this verbal sense is unlikely to appear outside of English sources predating the formal decline of Law French in court proceedings.