Definition
A Law French term meaning "except" or "excepted." Used in early legal instruments and statutes to carve out exceptions from a general rule or class. The term functions as an exclusionary particle — where a provision applied broadly, hors pris signaled that specified persons or things fell outside its reach.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The phrase has no recognized modern English meaning outside legal and historical contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The phrase did not enter general English usage.
Editorial note: This is pure Law French legal terminology with no common English counterpart. The section is omitted accordingly.
Common Confusion
Hors pris is occasionally misread in manuscript sources as a variant of hors de, meaning "outside of" or "beyond." While the practical effect is similar — both signal exclusion — hors pris functions as a term of express exception within a legal enumeration, while hors de tends to mark spatial or logical exteriority. Researchers working with untranscribed Norman or Anglo-French legal documents should not treat these as interchangeable.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern common law sources — Year Books, early English statutes, and legal treatises written in Law French before the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731 required English. Researchers encountering hors pris in manuscript or early print sources should treat it as a term of art marking explicit exceptions, not merely loose exclusionary language.
The Burrill entry preserves a usage example from Britton (c. 29) — hors pris clers, gentz de religion, et femmes — illustrating how the term organized categorical exceptions in medieval statutes: clerks, religious persons, and women were carved out from a class subject to some rule or obligation. This pattern of enumerated exception was standard drafting practice in Anglo-Norman legal texts and maps onto later English usage of "saving" and "excepting" clauses.
For corpus researchers, the practical traps are:
First, the term will not appear in post-1731 English legal documents, so absence from later sources is expected, not a gap.
Second, Law French dictionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries — including Black's and Burrill's — render this term only briefly, without full context. Researchers needing the operative meaning in a specific document may need to consult the surrounding text or the primary source (such as Britton) directly.
Third, the Scots equivalent "out taken" — noted in both Black's and Burrill's — signals that parallel terminology exists in Scottish legal materials. Researchers working across Anglo-Scottish sources should search both forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's agree completely on the core definition: hors pris means "except." Neither source elaborates on usage beyond the literal translation and the Scots equivalent. Burrill adds marginal value by preserving the Britton example, which grounds the term in a real medieval statutory context and illustrates its application to enumerated classes of persons.
Neither dictionary addresses the term's frequency, its extinction from post-Law French practice, or its relationship to equivalent Latin terms (such as exceptis or salvo). Historical dictionaries of this era treated Law French terms as glosses rather than as subjects of analysis, which means the corpus researcher must supply the contextual work the dictionaries do not.
No significant divergence between sources exists on this term.
Jurisdictional Note
Hors pris is a feature of English and Anglo-Norman legal drafting. Its appearance in Scottish sources (rendered as "out taken") suggests parallel use in Scots law, though the Scots legal tradition developed its own terminology independently. The term has no recognized role in American law.