Definition
In historical legal usage, "getter" (or "gette") is an Anglo-Norman French term with two related procedural senses found in early common law sources:
1. To throw or cast — used in the context of essoins, referring to the formal casting or lodging of an essoin before the court.
2. To bring — as in producing or presenting facts or pleadings before a court, as in the phrase "et getta les faits en court" (and brought the facts into court).
The term is not a term of art in modern law. Its significance is entirely historical, confined to the Anglo-Norman procedural vocabulary of medieval English courts.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To remove gas by sorption — a technical chemistry term with no relationship to the legal usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who gets, gains, obtains, acquires, begets, or procreates.
The ordinary English sense of "getter" as one who acquires or obtains is superficially suggestive of its legal use, but the legal term is more precise and procedural: it refers specifically to the act of casting or presenting something before a court in the context of formal pleading or essoin procedure, not to acquisition in the general sense. A researcher encountering "getter" or "gette" in a Year Book or Britt should not read it through the lens of the modern common meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with Year Books, Britton, or other Anglo-Norman legal texts will encounter "getter" and "gette" as procedural vocabulary tied to essoin practice — the formal process by which a party excused their absence from court. The "casting" of an essoin was a technical step in medieval procedure, and the verb "getter" signals that step.
Two traps await the unwary researcher:
First, transliteration and spelling variation. Anglo-Norman legal French is notoriously unstable in spelling. "Gette," "getter," and related forms appear inconsistently across manuscript and early printed sources. Index searches in digitized Year Book collections may miss occurrences depending on the transcription conventions used.
Second, false cognates. The modern English "get" and its derivatives carry no procedural freight. Translating "et getta les faits en court" loosely as "and got the facts into court" loses the specific meaning of formal presentment before the bench — a meaning with real procedural consequence in determining whether pleadings or essoins were properly lodged.
This term connects to broader research on essoin procedure, the mechanics of Anglo-Norman pleading, and the transition from Law French to English in court records. Researchers tracing this transition should note that the functional concept survives in later procedural sources under English vocabulary, but "getter" itself disappears from practice vocabulary by the early modern period.
Burrill is the primary shelf source identifying this term. Researchers should expect no coverage in later American or English legal dictionaries, as the term had no life in post-medieval practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this term and provides two glosses: (1) the translation "to throw or cast," citing Britton c. 74, 123 in the context of essoins; and (2) the translation "to bring," citing Year Book Michaelmas 19 Henry VI, f. 6, in the context of presenting facts in court.
These two senses are complementary rather than divergent — both describe the physical-procedural act of formally placing something before a court, whether a plea of essoin or a statement of facts. The metaphor of "throwing" or "casting" reflects the physicality embedded in medieval court ritual, where documents and formal pleas were literally tendered.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus cover this term. Cowell, Jacob, Black, and Bouvier do not include entries for "getter" or "gette" in this sense. Researchers should treat Burrill as the authoritative — and essentially sole — reference point, and follow its citations directly to Britton and the Year Books for primary source confirmation.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the English common law tradition and its Anglo-Norman procedural heritage. It has no presence in civil law, Scottish law, or American legal usage at any period.