Definition
In Law French legal usage, *grever* means to hurt, harm, prejudice, or injure. The term appears in early Anglo-Norman legal texts as a verb describing the act of causing harm or legal prejudice to a person, whether through direct physical injury or through an act that disadvantages another's legal position or rights.
Why It Matters in Research
GREVER is a term almost exclusively encountered in medieval and early modern legal sources written in Law French, the professional legal language of English courts from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. Researchers working with early treatises, plea rolls, or Year Books may encounter it in contexts describing actionable harm or grounds for complaint. Because it functions as a verb in its original form, it may appear in conjugated variants (*grevé*, *grever*, *grevant*), which can complicate word searches in digitized sources. The term carries both a physical sense (bodily hurt) and a juridical sense (legal prejudice or disadvantage), and context is required to determine which is operative in a given passage. Researchers should also be aware that the English legal vocabulary absorbed this concept under numerous successor terms — *injure*, *prejudice*, *aggrieve* — all of which carry some functional overlap with *grever*'s original scope.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary English-language legal dictionary source for this term. Burrill defines it concisely as meaning "to hurt or harm" and "to prejudice or injure," citing Britton (a late thirteenth-century treatise on English law written in Law French, attributed to John le Breton) at chapters 22, 28, and 39. The dual citation pattern — chapter 22 for the physical sense, chapters 28 and 39 for the sense of prejudice or injury — suggests the term was used across different legal contexts within the same foundational source. Historical dictionaries of Law French more broadly, such as those compiled to assist readers of the Year Books, would treat *grever* as standard vocabulary for harm-based legal claims. No significant divergence exists across sources for this term; its meaning was stable and narrow. What historical dictionaries collectively fail to address is the downstream influence of *grever* on common law pleading vocabulary, particularly the development of *aggrieve* as its functional English successor in appellate and equity practice.