Definition
In historical English legal usage, *lit* is an Anglo-French auxiliary verb meaning "it is lawful," "it is permitted," or "it pleased." It appears in early Year Book pleadings and legal French texts as a shorthand for asserting that an act was done as of right or by lawful authority — that the party had legal license or liberty to do the thing complained of. The phrase *come bien luy list* translates roughly as "as was lawful for him to do" or "as it well pleased him, being so entitled."
The term is not a substantive legal concept but a linguistic artifact of Law French, functioning in pleading as a modal expression of lawful permission.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To run or light; to alight or come to rest upon something. Also informal slang for intoxicated or illuminated.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A form of the past tense and past participle of "light" — as in a lamp that was lit, or a traveler who lit upon a path.
Neither the modern nor the 1913 common meaning has any relationship to the legal usage. The legal *lit* derives entirely from Law French and would be unrecognizable to a reader approaching it through English dictionaries alone. Researchers encountering *lit* in a Year Book passage or early plea roll should not apply any English-language meaning.
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Common Confusion
*Lit* as a Law French verb should not be confused with *licit* (the English adjective meaning "lawful" or "permitted"), though they share a conceptual family. The confusion is understandable: both express lawfulness, and *licit* derives from Latin *licet*, which is the functional Latin equivalent of *lit* in Anglo-French pleading. However, *licit* appears in modern legal writing and learned Latin contexts, while *lit* is confined to Law French Year Book materials and similar early sources. A researcher seeing *lit* in a post-medieval English legal text should suspect transcription error, Latinism, or metaphorical usage rather than the Law French term.
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Why It Matters in Research
*Lit* appears almost exclusively in Year Book materials and texts drawing directly on Law French pleading conventions — primarily sources from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Burrill's single citation, to Britton chapter 70 and the Year Books of Michaelmas term, 8 Edward (II or III depending on context), locates the term precisely in that tradition.
Researchers working in Law Mind's corpus of historical legal materials will encounter *lit* only when reading primary Year Book extracts, digests of those Year Books, or commentaries (like Britton or Fitzherbert's Abridgement) that reproduce or paraphrase Law French pleading. It will not appear in equity records, chancery proceedings, or common law reports after Law French was officially abolished by statute in the mid-seventeenth century.
The navigational trap is straightforward: a reader skimming Burrill or a Year Book digest will see *lit* and read past it as an English word — a past tense of "light" — missing that it is a term of legal art expressing lawful authorization. This misreading can cause a researcher to mischaracterize the nature of a defense or justification pleaded in an early action.
When the full phrase *come bien luy list* appears, it typically signals a plea of justification or license — the defendant asserting that the act was not wrongful because it was legally permitted. Understanding this phrase matters for anyone tracing the history of pleading justification defenses in trespass actions.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal — a single citation to Britton and the Year Books — but it does the essential work of glossing the phrase *come bien luy list* and confirming the translation "as was lawful for him to do." Burrill does not attempt a doctrinal analysis, which is appropriate: *lit* is a pleading artifact, not a doctrine.
The absence of the term from later historical dictionaries (Jacob's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's, Black's) is itself informative. By the time those works were compiled, Law French had been displaced and *lit* in this sense had become a purely antiquarian reference. Researchers should not expect to find the term glossed in any dictionary later than the mid-nineteenth century except in specialized Year Book scholarship.
Britton, the thirteenth-century treatise on English law written in Law French, is the primary source in which this usage is embedded. It represents one of the earliest systematic treatments of English law in that language, and its vocabulary carries the pleading conventions of the Edwardian period directly.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the common law tradition as it developed in England through the Law French period. It has no application in civil law jurisdictions and no recognized usage in American legal materials.
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