Definition
A thing produced by manual labor; a work of the hand. In medieval legal usage, maynover (also rendered as meinover or mainover) referred to a tangible object made or worked by hand, as distinguished from things existing naturally or produced by other means. The term appears in early common law records principally in the context of theft and possession, where having stolen goods found upon one's person — the "mainour" — was treated as conclusive or near-conclusive evidence of guilt.
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Common Confusion
Maynover is closely related to, and often confused with, MAINOUR (also spelled manor, maneur, or meinour in variant sources). These terms share a root and are sometimes treated as identical in historical dictionaries, but researchers should note a distinction that surfaces in some sources: mainour refers specifically to the stolen article found in the thief's possession at or near the time of the taking, while maynover is used in the broader sense of any article produced by manual labor. In practice, historical sources use both spellings interchangeably, and the distinction — where it exists — is contextual rather than categorical.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in pre-modern common law materials. Its practical legal significance lived almost entirely in the doctrine of being taken "with the mainour" — that is, caught red-handed with stolen goods — a concept that shaped early English criminal procedure by permitting summary proceedings against a thief apprehended in the act.
Several navigational traps deserve attention:
First, spelling variation is extreme. Historical sources render this term as maynover, meinover, mainour, meinour, manuopere, and various further corruptions. Searching Law Mind corpus sources under a single spelling will miss most instances. Researchers working in Year Book materials or early plea rolls should expand searches accordingly.
Second, the Year Book citation given in all three source dictionaries — Yearb. M. 4 Edw. III. 38 — is the locus classicus and appears to be the primary (possibly only) direct authority for the term as defined. The recurrence of this single citation across Black's and Burrill's suggests that later lexicographers were copying rather than independently verifying; treat it as a shared anchor, not as broad doctrinal consensus.
Third, by the time of the Second Edition of Black's, the entry has degraded in the source text — the passage quoted conflates MAYNOVER with the start of the MAYOR entry, a typographical artifact of the original page layout. Researchers relying on that edition should be aware the maynover entry ends at "manual labor" and what follows is a separate, unrelated definition.
Fourth, the term has no meaningful survival in modern legal usage. It is a historical curiosity rather than an operative legal concept, and its research value lies primarily in interpreting early criminal law materials and understanding the evidentiary logic behind in flagrante delicto doctrines.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on the core definition: "a work of the hand; a thing produced by manual labor," each citing the same Year Book passage. This unanimity reflects the term's narrow scope — there is little doctrinal content to dispute.
Burrill adds no elaboration beyond the shared definition and citation, consistent with his general approach to archaic French and Latin law terms. Neither Black's edition expands on the term's procedural significance in the mainour doctrine, which is covered separately under that headword.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: none explains why the concept mattered procedurally — that is, the connection between manually produced or manually held goods and the evidentiary significance of apprehension with stolen items in hand. That context must be reconstructed from criminal law treatises and Year Book scholarship rather than from the dictionary entries themselves.
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