Definition
In historical legal usage, *hommes* (also appearing as *prodhommes* or *prudhommes*) referred to men of discretion, judgment, or standing called upon to serve in a judicial or quasi-judicial capacity. The term appears most commonly in medieval and early feudal legal contexts, where it designated the members of a tribunal or body of peers charged with deciding disputes — roughly equivalent to jurors or assessors in the modern sense. Bouvier records three related forms: *hommes* as "discreet men" applied to jurors; *prud'hommes* or *prudhommes* as "great men" of standing; and *prudum* as "an honest man." Bouvier treats the latter two as corruptions of the original form.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The plural of *homme*, the ordinary French word for "man."
Historical common usage: No Webster's 1913 entry for this term; it was not treated as an English word.
In ordinary French, *hommes* carries no legal significance whatsoever. The legal meaning — men selected for their discretion and integrity to render judgment — is entirely a product of feudal and customary legal tradition, not derivable from the plain French meaning. A researcher encountering the term in legal sources should not read it as merely "men" in the generic sense.
Common Confusion
The three forms Bouvier records (*hommes*, *prud'hommes*, *prudhommes*) are not synonyms of equal weight, though they are related. *Hommes* in its bare form designated the juror or peer body generally. *Prud'hommes* (literally "prudent men" or "good men") carried stronger connotations of status and public esteem, and the term survived in European legal usage far longer — most notably in the French *conseils de prud'hommes*, labor tribunals that persist to this day. Conflating the bare term *hommes* with *prud'hommes* collapses a meaningful distinction of degree that medieval sources preserved.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law sources, Norman legal texts, or feudal tenure records will encounter *hommes* in contexts where the modern English word "jurors" or "peers" would be used in later sources. The term signals that the document predates or draws from Norman-French legal tradition, which is important for dating, provenance, and interpretive context.
Two navigational traps require attention. First, the word appears in Latin-language texts as well as French ones, often without translation, and its function in a given passage — juror, vassal, sworn man, or simply "men of the community" — must be determined from context rather than assumed. Second, the corruption forms (*prudhommes*, *prudum*) appear inconsistently across medieval manuscripts and early printed legal sources. Researchers relying on indices or keyword searches may miss variant spellings entirely.
The term has essentially no operational presence in modern American or English case law. Its research value is concentrated in: (1) medieval and early common law history; (2) Norman and feudal land tenure studies; (3) comparative European legal history, particularly French customary law; and (4) the intellectual history of the jury as an institution. Researchers using Law Mind sources on jury origins or the feudal court system should treat *hommes* as a gateway term pointing backward to institutional antecedents rather than forward to modern doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier is the primary shelf source with a substantive entry. His treatment is brief but careful: he distinguishes the three forms, attributes the *prud'hommes* and *prudum* variants to Burrill and Kelham respectively, and flags the latter two as "obvious corruptions" — a judgment consistent with modern French philological understanding, where *prud'homme* is a compound (*preux* + *homme*, or *prod* + *homme*) that became standardized over time. Bouvier does not explore the institutional history of the body these men composed, which limits his entry's utility for researchers wanting to understand the *function* of the *hommes* rather than just the word.
No other standard shelf legal dictionaries (Black's, Rapalje & Lawrence, Tomlin) carry a substantive entry for this term, reflecting its status as a medieval technical term rather than a living legal concept in the Anglo-American tradition by the time those dictionaries were compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
The term has active modern legal life in France, where *conseils de prud'hommes* remain functioning labor dispute tribunals. In Anglo-American jurisdictions, *hommes* is purely historical. Researchers should not assume that French secondary sources using *prud'hommes* in a modern labor law context are discussing the same institution as medieval English legal sources using *hommes* in a jury context.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: JURY (for institutional history of the peer judgment body these men composed); FEUDAL TENURE (for the role of *hommes* as vassals or sworn men in land tenure contexts).