Definition
Mainor (also spelled "mainour") is an archaic common law term referring to stolen property found in the possession of a thief at the time of apprehension — literally, the stolen thing caught "in hand." The term carries a dual meaning in historical sources:
1. The stolen article itself, when discovered on the thief's person or otherwise in his immediate possession.
2. The condition of being caught in the act of theft with the stolen goods still in hand — giving rise to the phrase "taken with the mainour," meaning caught red-handed.
At common law, a thief apprehended with the mainour — that is, with stolen property in his possession — could be brought before a court, arraigned, and tried without the requirement of a formal grand jury indictment. This was an exception to the ordinary indictment process, justified by the presumed certainty of guilt when the stolen goods were found on the accused. The procedure was abolished during the reign of Edward III, after which prosecution by indictment became the required path regardless of circumstances.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The stolen article found on the person of the thief; also, the act or fact of theft.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A thing stolen found on the person of the thief.
The gap here is procedural, not definitional. Common usage captures only the physical object — the stolen thing in hand. The legal significance of the term lies less in what the mainour was than in what it triggered: a summary mode of prosecution that bypassed indictment entirely. Historical dictionaries and ordinary usage alike tend to understate this procedural consequence.
Common Confusion
Mainor is sometimes loosely equated with the phrase "caught red-handed," and the concepts are closely related, but they are not identical. Red-handed refers colloquially to being caught in the commission of any wrongful act. Mainor is specifically technical: it required that the stolen object itself be physically present on the accused, and it carried a precise procedural consequence — dispensing with indictment — that the phrase "red-handed" does not imply. Researchers encountering either phrase in historical sources should not assume they carry equivalent legal weight.
Why It Matters in Research
Mainor is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in historical common law sources, treatises on criminal procedure, and legal dictionaries predating the twentieth century. It has no operative modern legal meaning — the procedural mechanism it described was extinguished centuries ago.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the spelling varies. "Mainor" and "mainour" both appear in historical sources, sometimes within the same text. Corpus searches should account for both forms.
Second, the phrase "taken with the mainour" appears in older English legal records and commentary as a fixed idiom. When encountered, it signals not merely that the accused possessed stolen goods but that the summary trial procedure was potentially invoked. Readers who treat it as simple description of possession will miss the procedural dimension.
Third, the abolition under Edward III means that sources from different periods reflect different states of the law. Pre-abolition records may reflect the expedited trial process; post-abolition sources treat the term as descriptive or antiquarian only. Researchers working with Year Books or early plea rolls should be attentive to this line.
Fourth, mainor has relevance to the broader history of indictment and grand jury procedure. Its abolition is part of the longer arc in which the grand jury indictment became entrenched as the standard gateway to felony prosecution in English law — a development with direct downstream consequences in American constitutional history, including the Fifth Amendment's grand jury clause.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides the most complete account in the Law Mind corpus, capturing both the physical and procedural meanings and correctly situating the abolition under Edward III. Anderson's phrasing — "taken with the mainour, that is, with the thing stolen in manu, in his hand" — reflects the standard Latin gloss that appears across historical legal commentary, confirming that the term is a direct anglicization of the Latin in manu (in hand).
Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary both recognize the term but confine their definitions to the physical object. Neither addresses the procedural consequence that gave the term its legal significance. For a term that is almost purely of historical and procedural interest, this is a meaningful omission.
No modern legal dictionaries in the standard research corpus define mainor as an active term. Its presence in any source later than the medieval period is antiquarian or historical.
Jurisdictional Note
Mainor is a term of English common law with no distinct American variant. Because the procedural mechanism it described was abolished before the founding era, it never took root in American practice. Researchers encountering the term in American sources will find it only in historical or comparative discussions of grand jury procedure.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: THEFT; LARCENY; INDICTMENT (for the procedural context in which mainor operated and was eventually superseded)