Definition
A Law French adverb meaning "now" or "presently." In medieval English legal texts and pleadings, maintenant signified immediacy — an act done at once, without delay, or at the present moment. It appears most often in early property and feudal law contexts, where the timing of an act (such as entry, livery of seisin, or acknowledgment) carried legal consequence.
The term is not a substantive legal doctrine but a temporal marker embedded in archaic legal instruments and year book entries. Its significance lies entirely in the precision it lent to timing under a system where "now" versus "then" could determine whether a right had vested, a forfeiture had occurred, or a condition had been satisfied.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In modern French, "maintenant" is the ordinary word for "now" or "at present." It carries no specialized meaning.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not include "maintenant" as an English entry; it remained a recognized Law French term rather than a naturalized English word.
The gap here is contextual rather than semantic. A researcher encountering the word knows what it means — "now" — but may underestimate why its placement in a legal instrument mattered. In a system where rights in land depended on precise moments of act and acknowledgment, a temporal marker like maintenant was doing functional legal work, not merely stylistic decoration.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is an archival signal more than a searchable doctrine. Researchers working in early English property law, year books, or treatises on feudal tenure will encounter maintenant as part of the period's Law French vocabulary. Its presence marks a passage as either directly quoted from or closely modeled on medieval sources.
The key research trap: do not conflate maintenant with "maintenance" (the tort or the substantive doctrine). The words look nothing alike in Law French, but in anglicized or partially translated sources, a careless transcription or modernization may obscure the original. Always return to the Law French when the surrounding context is about timing or immediacy of an act.
For corpus researchers, maintenant appears in Littleton's Tenures (the reference in Burrill points to section 127), which is a foundational feudal property text. If you are reading Littleton — or Coke upon Littleton — you are in territory where Law French terms like this pepper the original and the commentary. Kelham's Law French dictionary, also cited by Burrill, is the standard gloss for this vocabulary and is worth consulting alongside any primary source encounter.
Jurisdictional and temporal scope is narrow: this is an English common law term of art from the medieval through early modern period. It has no direct analog in civil law systems, no statutory definition, and no modern operative meaning in any jurisdiction.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives the entry its full treatment in five words: "L. Fr. Presently." The citation to Littleton section 127 anchors it in the feudal property tradition. Kelham is noted as a secondary gloss source.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus cover this term, which itself reflects the word's status: it is vocabulary, not doctrine. Black's Law Dictionary editions do not carry an independent entry for maintenant, and it does not appear as a headword in Bouvier. This gap in the broader historical dictionary record confirms that the term was already receding into pure historical citation by the nineteenth century, when the major American legal dictionaries were compiled.
What the historical sources collectively do not provide: any record of litigation turning on the meaning of maintenant itself, or of courts parsing the word for substantive effect. It was a marker absorbed into the formulaic fabric of medieval instruments rather than contested in its own right.
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