Definition
A historical English term appearing in legal and administrative record-keeping contexts, denoting the act of marking or noting an entry — that is, to put something down in writing as a record. The term surfaces in English chancery practice as a verb of administrative notation, used to describe the act by which clerks or officers of a court marked or registered proceedings, documents, or orders in the official books of record.
The usage is narrow, archaic, and confined almost entirely to descriptions of early English chancery procedure and record management. It does not carry forward into modern legal usage in any recognizable form.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A surname; no common-language meaning relevant to this context.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A dialectal English word for cows or cattle (plural of "cow," provincial English). See also Kie, Ky, Kine.
Editorial note: The gap between the common-language and legal meanings is total. The legal term "kee" as used in chancery contexts has no connection whatsoever to the provincial English cattle term. Researchers encountering "kee" in historical legal manuscripts should not assume the dialectal meaning; context — specifically, administrative or chancery record-keeping language — controls the interpretation.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal records, particularly chancery materials, may encounter this term in procedural descriptions or marginal notations. The risk of misreading is real: the word appears infrequently and is not defined in most legal dictionaries, and its provincial English cattle-related homonym (documented in Webster's 1913) could mislead a researcher encountering it without context.
Burrill's citation to Crabb's History of English Law (at page 184) is the primary anchor. Researchers tracing this term should go directly to Crabb's work for the fuller procedural context; Burrill's entry is fragmentary and appears to have been extracted mid-sentence from a longer passage, which limits its standalone usefulness.
This term is unlikely to appear in American legal sources at any period. It belongs strictly to the English common law and equity tradition, and specifically to the internal administrative vocabulary of the Court of Chancery. Any appearance in an American document would almost certainly be a direct quotation or scholarly reference to English chancery practice rather than operative legal language.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus to record this term, and even there the entry is a fragment: "of chancery, so called. Crabb's Hist. Eng. Law, 184. To mark; to put down in writing." The truncated form suggests the original passage in Crabb provided a fuller explanation of the term's use within chancery record-keeping procedures, and that Burrill excerpted only the definitional core.
No other major historical legal dictionaries — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — appear to have given "kee" a standalone entry. This absence reinforces the term's status as deep administrative jargon rather than a term of legal art with broad jurisprudential significance. The historical record does not permit confident reconstruction of the full scope of the term's use; Crabb's primary text remains the essential source.
Jurisdictional Note
Strictly English in origin and application. No evidence of adoption or use in American, Scottish, Irish, or colonial legal practice. Researchers in non-English jurisdictions will not encounter this term as operative legal vocabulary.