Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "every" or "each." KASKUN is a corrupted form of CHESCUN, the standard Law French rendering of the same concept. The term appears in medieval legal records and instruments where it functions as a universal quantifier — designating each member of a class or all persons or things within a described group, without exception.
Why It Matters in Research
KASKUN is a transcription variant, not a term with independent legal content. Researchers encountering it in manuscript sources, year books, or early printed law reports should treat it as orthographically equivalent to CHESCUN and consult that entry for substantive meaning. The importance of recognizing KASKUN lies entirely in its identification: a reader unfamiliar with the variant may fail to parse a passage correctly or may search fruitlessly for a term that carries no separate doctrinal weight.
Law French orthography was notoriously unstable across time and copyists. The same word could appear in a dozen spellings within a single generation of records, and corruption accelerated as scribes with diminishing fluency in the language reproduced documents by ear or from faulty exemplars. KASKUN represents this degradation in miniature. When working in the Law Mind corpus with early English legal materials — particularly plea rolls, conveyancing precedents, or reports predating the formal displacement of Law French in the eighteenth century — expect to encounter spelling variants of common function words that do not appear in any standard glossary. The correct research move is to identify the root form (here, CHESCUN) and proceed from there.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical shelf source for this term, and its entry is brief to the point of being a pure redirect: Kelham is cited as the authority for the gloss "every," and the entry identifies KASKUN explicitly as a corrupted form of CHESCUN. This is consistent with the function of Burrill's as a comprehensive collector of Law French vocabulary, including degraded variants that a researcher might encounter in the field. No substantive legal doctrine attaches to the term in Burrill's, nor would one expect it to. The entry's value is confirmatory — it tells the researcher that the variant was recognized and documented, and that its meaning is not ambiguous once identified.