Definition
An abbreviated or alternative spelling of "maj," itself a variant form of MAINOUR — the archaic legal term denoting the thing stolen found upon the person of a suspected thief at the time of arrest. The form "maj" has no independent legal meaning; it is a scribal or typographic variant encountered in historical legal manuscripts and printed reports, not a term of art in its own right. Researchers encountering "maj" in historical sources should treat it as a pointer to the substantive entry for MAINOUR.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Alternative form of "maj," itself an informal abbreviation of "major" (as in military rank or academic subject).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded as a standard entry; "maj." appeared as an abbreviation for "major" in military and general contexts.
Editorial note: The gap here is less between common and legal meaning than between different historical legal spellings. The common abbreviation "maj" (for major) is unrelated to the legal form. A researcher unfamiliar with archaic orthographic variation could easily misread the term in a manuscript context and reach a wrong conclusion about what the passage concerns.
Common Confusion
"Maj" is easily confused with the abbreviation for "major" in military, musical, or academic contexts. In legal manuscripts and early printed reports, however, "maj" is a corrupted or compressed rendering of "mainour" (or its variants: mainour, manner, manour, meynovere). The corruption of mainour into "manner" — and from there into shortened scribal forms — is well documented in the early reports. Burrill notes the progression explicitly: mainour → manner → further variant forms. A reader encountering "taken in the maj" in a seventeenth-century manuscript should understand the phrase as equivalent to "taken in the mainour," meaning caught with the stolen goods in hand.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English criminal law reports, plea rolls, or treatises may encounter this form without annotation. Several practical traps exist:
Orthographic instability: Legal terms in manuscript sources were subject to extreme spelling variation. "Mainour" appears in historical sources as mainour, manor, manner, manour, meynovere, and compressed forms. Recognizing "maj" as belonging to this family requires familiarity with the term's evolution.
Citation chains: Burrill cites Hobart 125, 1 Show. 57, and Comb. 159–160 in connection with the mainour/manner cluster. If a researcher is tracing the doctrine through these reporters, variant spellings may cause the relevant passages to be missed in keyword searches.
Scope of the doctrine: The underlying legal rule — that a thief caught with stolen goods in hand (in the mainour) could be subjected to summary process — had procedural consequences distinct from ordinary theft prosecutions. Misidentifying the term means misidentifying the procedural posture of the case.
Modern irrelevance vs. historical importance: "Maj" as a legal form has no living application. Its importance is purely historical and bibliographic — it matters only insofar as it blocks or enables access to the underlying doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats this term as a variant form within a larger entry on mainour, documenting the chain of corruption from the Norman French "meynovere" (which Barrington considered the true form, per Obs. Stat. 350) through mainour, to manor, to the English "manner," and finally to compressed or degraded scribal forms. Burrill quotes Hobart 125 for the phrase "upon the book" in connection with the mainour oath, and cites Show. and Comb. for the later "taken in the manner" formulation. No historical dictionary treats "maj" as a primary entry with independent content; it is uniformly subordinate to mainour in the sources. What the historical dictionaries collectively do not address is the bibliographic problem this creates for modern researchers using digitized full-text search, where spelling normalization may not capture the full range of variants.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: MAINOUR