Definition
Mal de venue is an archaic French legal phrase meaning "illness in coming" or "sickness on the way." It denoted a specific type of essoin — a formal excuse recognized by early common law — by which a party summoned to appear before a court could be excused from attendance on the ground that illness had overtaken him while traveling to the court. The excuse was not that the party was too ill to have set out, but that he had fallen sick in the course of the journey itself, rendering his arrival impossible.
Common Confusion
Mal de venue is one of several similarly named essoins that researchers may conflate. De malo veniendi referred to difficulty in coming (often distinguished from illness specifically). De malo lecti described a party confined to bed — a more severe physical incapacity with different procedural rules. The distinctions mattered procedurally in the courts that recognized them: different categories of essoin triggered different waiting periods and different rights in the opposing party. When reading early records, identifying which essoin was cast requires attention to the precise phrase used, not merely the general concept of illness or absence.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English and Anglo-Norman legal texts and is unlikely to surface outside of early common law records, plea rolls, or treatises dealing with medieval procedure. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should understand that mal de venue was one of several formally classified essoins, each with its own rules, time limits, and procedural consequences. The vocabulary of essoins was technical and precise: confusing mal de venue with de malo lecti (essoin of bedridden illness) or other categories could lead to misreading a procedural posture entirely.
Because the phrase appears in Law French — the corrupted Anglo-Norman legal dialect used in English courts through roughly the seventeenth century — it may be rendered inconsistently across manuscripts and printed abridgments. Variant spellings and abbreviated forms are common in early plea rolls and Year Books. Researchers should not assume a standardized orthography.
The practical significance of essoins as a category largely dissolved after the procedural reforms of the nineteenth century, particularly the reforms that reorganized English civil procedure. Mal de venue therefore has no living procedural counterpart in modern common law systems and functions today purely as a term of historical legal art.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary identifies mal de venue as one of the "old essoins," translating the phrase as "illness in coming" and cross-referencing it to the broader entry on Malum. Burrill's treatment is brief and classificatory rather than explanatory, reflecting the term's status as an acknowledged but minor piece of medieval procedural vocabulary. The entry's brevity is itself informative: by the time Burrill compiled his dictionary in the mid-nineteenth century, the essoin system was a historical relic, and the term warranted acknowledgment rather than exposition.
The cross-reference to "bon gree ou mal" (with or without consent) noted in Burrill appears to be an incidental editorial artifact of proximity in the original source rather than a substantive conceptual link. Researchers should not read a doctrinal relationship between mal de venue and that phrase.
Older common law treatises — Bracton's De Legibus, Glanvill, and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium — address essoin procedure in greater depth than any nineteenth-century dictionary is likely to reproduce. Those primary sources provide the working context for understanding how mal de venue operated: who could cast it, how many times, before which courts, and what procedural consequences followed. Burrill and similar dictionaries of his era serve as finding aids to this vocabulary, not substitutes for the primary material.
Jurisdictional Note
The essoin system, including mal de venue, was a feature of English common law procedure and was carried in modified forms into early American colonial courts. It did not develop in parallel in civil law jurisdictions. By the time American procedural law was systematically codified, essoins had been substantially abandoned, and the term has no recognized role in any current American or English procedural code.