Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "hand." Appearing in early English legal sources, *mein* (also rendered *main*) carried its literal sense of the physical hand, deployed in legal contexts where oaths, possession, and physical acts required precise vocabulary. The term appears most notably in the phrase *meins mises sur seintz* — hands laid upon the holy (Gospels) — describing the physical gesture of oath-taking in which a party placed their hands upon sacred scripture to give solemnity and binding force to a sworn declaration.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A surname only; no common English meaning survives.
Historical common usage: The term has no entry in Webster's 1913, reflecting its complete disappearance from ordinary English by the nineteenth century.
The gap here is total rather than partial. *Mein* as a legal term is not a case of legal meaning diverging from common meaning — the word simply ceased to function as a common English word entirely, surviving only in historical legal records and Law French glossaries. Researchers encountering it in early sources cannot rely on any living language intuition for guidance.
Common Confusion
*Mein* is easily confused with *main*, the anglicized and more frequently encountered form of the same Law French root. Both derive from the same word meaning hand and appear in overlapping legal contexts. *Main* survived into later legal English in terms such as *mainprise*, *mainour*, and *mainsworn*, while *mein* remained the more archaic spelling confined to earlier records and formal glossaries. Researchers should not treat these as distinct words when tracing a term across sources of different periods.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical significance of *mein* is almost entirely paleographic and terminological: you are unlikely to encounter it as a standalone headword in a legal dispute, but very likely to encounter it embedded in a Law French phrase within early plea rolls, oath formularies, or procedural records. The phrase *meins mises sur seintz* appears in descriptions of oath ceremonies and should be read as a procedural marker — evidence that a formal sworn declaration was being recorded, not merely an informal assertion.
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal records should note that Law French oath vocabulary was highly formulaic. The same phrases recur across centuries and jurisdictions with little variation, which means that identifying *mein* or its variants in one document type helps decode identical phrasing in others. Because Burrill glosses the term from Kelham's *Glossary of Norman and Old French Law Words* rather than from caselaw directly, the evidentiary trail runs through legal glossography rather than reported decisions.
The anglicized family — *mainprise*, *mainour*, *mainsworn* — is far more consequential for substantive legal research. A researcher who understands *mein* as the root has the interpretive key to that entire cluster of terms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal by design: a single line of gloss, a phrase, and a citation to Kelham. This reflects the term's status as vocabulary-support material rather than a substantive legal concept requiring extended treatment. Burrill is doing what any good historical dictionary does with a purely functional particle word — defining it, illustrating its use in a set phrase, and pointing to the philological authority.
No other major English legal dictionary (Bouvier, Black, Jacob) carries *mein* as a headword, though *main* and its derivatives appear across all of them. This absence confirms that by the time those dictionaries were compiled, *mein* had been fully superseded by the anglicized spelling and absorbed into derivative terms.