Definition
An Anglo-Norman French legal verb meaning to journey or travel in an official judicial capacity — specifically, to perform an iter or eyre. The term describes the act of a royal justice riding a circuit through the counties of medieval England to hold court on behalf of the Crown. It is the verbal form underlying the noun "eyre" and related terms such as "iter" and "itinerant."
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in medieval English legal records, Year Books, and treatises dealing with the eyre system — roughly from the twelfth through the early fourteenth century. Because the eyre as an institution largely collapsed by the mid-fourteenth century, the term irrer has no meaningful life in post-medieval common law sources. A researcher who stumbles across it in a secondary source treating medieval procedure should understand it as part of a technical vocabulary describing a judicial institution that was already archaic by the time Blackstone wrote.
The verb form irrer rarely appears in isolation in the sources. More commonly, researchers will encounter its nominal derivatives — iter and eyre — and should treat those entries as the primary research targets. Irrer is best understood as a dictionary bridge: it explains the verbal root from which those nominal forms descend and confirms that the underlying concept was always one of physical judicial movement through the realm, not a fixed court. This matters when reading older treatises that use "eyre," "iter," and "itinerant" somewhat interchangeably — all derive from the same root action that irrer names.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal authority for this term in the Law Mind corpus, attributing the definition to Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779). Kelham remains one of the few dedicated sources for Anglo-Norman legal vocabulary, and Burrill's reliance on it here is typical of his method with Norman French terms: he traces the term to its authority without elaborating on the institutional context.
No other major historical dictionaries in the corpus — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's, nor Bouvier's — carry this verb form as a distinct entry, which itself signals the term's narrow technical niche. The absence reflects the fact that by the time these later dictionaries were compiled, the eyre system had been extinct for centuries and the verb irrer had no living application. Researchers should not read that silence as contradiction; it is simply the result of later lexicographers focusing on terms with active legal relevance.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is exclusively English in origin and application. It has no recognized counterpart in Scots law, civil law systems, or American jurisprudence. Research use is confined to medieval English legal history.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia: Eyres and Itinerant Justices