Definition
Law French. To marry. Used in medieval English legal texts to denote the act of marriage, particularly in contexts where royal or feudal consent to marriage was required. The term appears in its conjugated forms as well: *marie* (married) and the paired phrase *marie ou dismarie* (married or unmarried), which functioned as a comprehensive status designation in pleading and record-keeping.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in Year Book material and early English statutory and treatise sources written in Law French — the distinctive legal dialect that dominated English court records from roughly the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. The term carries no independent doctrinal weight of its own; its significance is contextual. When *marier* appears in a source, it typically signals one of two legal concerns: (1) the feudal lord's or Crown's right to control the marriage of wards, widows, or tenants — a major property and revenue issue in medieval land law — or (2) marital status as a determinative fact in pleading, particularly regarding a woman's capacity to sue or be sued (the coverture framework turning on whether she was *marie* or *dismarie*).
The phrase *ne se pussent marier sans nostre conge* ("may not marry without our leave"), drawn from Britton, is representative of the prerogative language surrounding wardship and marriage in feudal tenure. Researchers tracing the history of wardship, marriage licenses, or the Crown's feudal revenues should treat occurrences of *marier* as a gateway into that body of doctrine rather than as a freestanding concept.
Because Law French was not a living vernacular but a specialized legal register, modern researchers should be cautious about assuming consistent spelling across sources. Variant spellings and forms are common in manuscript and early print sources, and indexing in historical databases may not capture all variants.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry, citing Britton (c. 67) for the consent-to-marry formula and the Year Books (Michaelmas Term, 9 Edward) for the *marie ou dismarie* construction. Burrill treats *marier* straightforwardly as a translation item — its value is definitional rather than analytical, consistent with the function of Law French glossaries in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries generally.
No substantive divergence exists among historical dictionary sources because the term is not contested doctrine; it is vocabulary. What historical dictionaries collectively leave unaddressed is the broader legal structure that gave the term its practical importance: the feudal incidents of marriage under military tenure, the enforcement mechanisms available to lords when tenants married without license, and the procedural significance of marital status in actions at common law. Researchers needing that analytical layer must look beyond the dictionaries to treatises such as Glanvill, Bracton, and Littleton, as well as to the Year Book series itself.
Jurisdictional Note
As a Law French term rooted in English feudal tenure, *marier* and its variants are relevant only to English legal history and jurisdictions that inherited the English common law tradition. It has no application in civil law or continental legal systems.