Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "to deliver" or, in its various inflected forms, "delivered" or "we delivered." The term appears in early English legal records as a verb form signifying the act of delivery — the transfer or handing over of property, a writ, possession, or other legal thing from one party to another. It is not a standalone substantive noun in ordinary usage but functions as a term of record, appearing in year books and early plea rolls to document the fact of delivery having occurred.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recorded as a standard English word in modern use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded.
Editorial note: "Liverer" has no foothold in ordinary English, modern or historical. It is purely a relic of Law French record-keeping, and a researcher encountering it should treat it as documentary shorthand for delivery rather than as a term with a freestanding legal definition of its own.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English year books, plea rolls, or early Abridgments will encounter this term and its variants — livere, liveres, livromus — without explanation. Misreading or ignoring the term can obscure what the record is asserting: namely, that a transfer or delivery actually took place.
Several navigational points:
First, the inflected forms matter. Livere (delivered, past) and livromus (we delivered, first-person plural past) signal different procedural postures. A livromus entry suggests a formal declaration by a court officer or sheriff; livere may appear in a judgment or return.
Second, do not confuse the verb form with the noun form. Law French records sometimes use livery or liverée as a noun (meaning the act or ceremony of delivery, particularly of seisin). Liverer and its variants are verbal — they record the act, not the concept.
Third, the Year Book citation in Burrill (H. 12 Hen. VI. 7) places this term firmly in the Lancastrian period, roughly the 1430s. Researchers using this term as a search anchor in year book indexes should expect it only in pre-modern materials. It will not appear in post-Statute of Frauds (1677) conveyancing records with any frequency, as formal English replaced Law French in legal proceedings.
Fourth, corpus researchers should note that the forms livere and liveres are easily misread as variants of livery in transcribed manuscripts. Paleographic care is essential.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the only shelf source to record this term. His entry is minimal — three lines — but it usefully flags the distinct inflected forms and anchors each to a specific source: Kelham's Norman French glossary for the basic verb form, Britton (chapters 2 and 48) for livere and liveres, and the Year Books for livromus.
What Burrill does not address: the procedural context in which each form appears. Britton, a late-thirteenth-century legal treatise written in Law French, uses these forms in the context of writs and returns — which suggests the term was part of standardized procedural formulae, not just casual record notation. A researcher wanting to understand how liverer functioned in practice should consult Britton directly rather than relying on Burrill's gloss alone.
No other Law Mind shelf dictionary (Black's, Bouvier's, Tomlin's, Jacob's) records this term, which underscores its narrow archival significance. It was already obsolete as active legal vocabulary by the time those dictionaries were compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
Exclusively an English legal term from the Norman French period of English law. It has no analog in American, Scottish, or civilian legal systems and will not appear in any American primary source.