Definition
An archaic Law French adverb meaning "slightly," "easily," or "shortly." The term appears in early English legal texts and pleadings as a modifier describing the manner or degree of an action. In the context where it appears, legerement characterizes something done lightly or without great force or deliberation — as opposed to heavily, gravely, or with full intent.
The term is not operative in modern legal usage. It survives only in historical sources as a relic of the Law French vocabulary that saturated English common law pleading through the medieval and early modern periods.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term is not part of modern English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. By the nineteenth century, the word had fallen entirely out of circulation.
The base form leger persists in modern English in narrow contexts — most recognizably in "leger line" in music notation, or in the archaic sense of "light" or "nimble" — but legerement as an adverbial form carries no modern common currency whatsoever. Researchers encountering the term in a primary legal source should not attempt to reconstruct its meaning from modern cognates; the historical legal dictionary record is the only reliable guide.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a paleographic and linguistic obstacle, not a legal concept with substantive doctrinal weight. Researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus — particularly in medieval Year Books, early common law pleadings, or treatises drawing on Law French sources — may encounter legerement as a qualifier embedded in a phrase. Its presence signals a degree or manner question: how something was done, not what was done.
The critical trap is misreading legerement as a substantive term rather than an adverb. A pleading that alleges a defendant acted legerement is making a claim about the character of the act — its lightness, ease, or brevity — and that characterization may carry legal consequence depending on context (for instance, distinguishing a slight touching from a forcible one in early trespass pleadings).
Researchers should also be alert to variant spellings across manuscripts. Law French orthography was inconsistent, and leger-derived forms may appear as legerement, legerement, or with minor scribal variations. Cross-referencing with Kelham's glossary of Law French, cited by Burrill, is the appropriate next step when the term appears in an unfamiliar context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary surviving American legal dictionary entry for this term. Burrill's definition is brief and functional — "slightly; easily; shortly" — and attributes the gloss to Kelham, referring to Robert Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), the standard reference work for Law French vocabulary used by English legal lexicographers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
No substantive doctrinal content surrounds the term in Burrill's entry, which is itself a signal: legerement was treated even by nineteenth-century legal lexicographers as a purely linguistic artifact worth recording for translation purposes rather than for any ongoing doctrinal function. Earlier English legal dictionaries in the Rastell-Cowell tradition similarly preserve Law French adverbs of this kind without attaching legal rules to them.
The historical record is consistent on meaning. There is no divergence among sources on what the word denotes; the only scholarly work required is identifying the word correctly in a primary text and rendering it accurately in translation.
Jurisdictional Note
Not applicable. Legerement is a Law French term belonging to the historical vocabulary of English common law. It carries no jurisdiction-specific modern application and does not vary across legal systems.