Definition
An obsolete Law French term meaning judgment — that is, the formal decision or ruling of a court. The term appears in medieval English legal records and Year Books as the direct precursor to the modern English "judgment." Burrill records two compound forms in active use:
1. Jugement de brief: A judgment concerning a writ; the court's ruling on a matter raised by or relating to a writ.
2. Jugement de count: A judgment on a count; a ruling addressing the sufficiency or substance of a pleading count.
Note: Burrill's entry conflates two distinct entries. The second half of the source passage — yoke, jugum, and jugum terrae — belongs to a separate headword (JUGUM) and carries no connection to judgment. These are unrelated Latin and Law Latin land-measurement terms and are not part of this entry.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete spelling of judgment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Judgment. [Obs.] — Chaucer.
Both sources confirm that jugement was once standard English as well as legal French. The gap worth noting for researchers is directional: what looks like a "legal term" in a medieval source may simply be the period's ordinary spelling, not a term of art requiring special legal interpretation. The specifically legal content lies in the compound phrases — jugement de brief, jugement de count — rather than in the base word itself.
Common Confusion
Jugement should not be confused with the separate headword JUGUM TERRÆ (a yoke of land; half a plough-land) or with JUGUM (a yoke as a land measure). Burrill's entry runs these together in sequence, and researchers skimming the page may conflate them. They share no legal relationship; the proximity is alphabetical only.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English Year Books, plea rolls, or Law French materials will encounter jugement as the standard spelling for what modern sources call judgment. The term requires no special doctrinal treatment as a standalone word — its significance is orthographic and linguistic, marking the source as pre-modern.
The compound forms carry more research weight. Jugement de brief surfaces in Michaelmas Term, 4 Edward III (Year Book citation in Burrill), and jugement de count in Hilary Term, 8 Edward III. Researchers tracing the procedural history of writ-based pleading or the development of counts in common law pleading should note these as early recorded usages of those concepts in their French-language form.
The primary trap in historical sources is the Burrill conflation noted above. Any index or digest that groups jugement with jugum or jugalium has likely reproduced Burrill's compressed entry without parsing it. Cross-checking against Cowell's Interpreter or Spelman's Glossarium will clarify the land-measure terms as entirely separate.
Because jugement is essentially a spelling variant rather than a term with independent doctrinal content, its corpus value lies in dating and localizing sources — a document using jugement is almost certainly English, pre-fifteenth century, and composed in or drawing on Law French pleading convention.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary source here, and his entry is notably compressed to the point of being misleading. He records jugement correctly as Law French for judgment and cites Britton (chapters 87 and 100) as authority, alongside the two Year Book citations for the compound phrases. Britton, the thirteenth-century treatise on English law written in Law French, is the expected source for this vocabulary.
Where Burrill's entry fails the researcher is in its structural ambiguity: the shift from jugement (judgment) to jugum (yoke, land measure) happens mid-entry without a clear break, conflating two alphabetically adjacent but conceptually unrelated terms. No other major historical law dictionary — not Cowell, not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin — makes this conflation, and Cowell treats jugum terrae independently and with greater precision, citing Domesday and Coke's commentary.
Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary agree that jugement was also common English spelling (Chaucer uses it), confirming that the Law French form and the Middle English form were, at least orthographically, the same word.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: JUDGMENT — for the full doctrinal treatment of judgments in common law procedure, including interlocutory and final judgments, judgment on the pleadings, and the historical development from Law French practice.