Definition
An Anglo-Norman legal term meaning business, occupation, or trade. In medieval English law, *mestier* referred to the duties, functions, or affairs belonging to a particular office or calling. The term appears in Law French legal texts to describe the proper business or ministerial work associated with a defined role — most notably the administrative and judicial functions belonging to a crown officer such as a coroner.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *mestier* will find it almost exclusively in early English legal manuscripts and treatises written in Law French, particularly those predating the gradual displacement of Law French by Latin and English in legal writing. The term is not a term of art with lasting doctrinal significance; rather, it functions as connective vocabulary that describes the scope of an officeholder's duties. Its importance to corpus research is navigational: when reading Britton or comparable early sources, *mestier* signals a passage describing the affirmative obligations or functional scope of an office, not a grant of authority or a jurisdictional limit in the modern sense.
Researchers should be alert to the broader linguistic context. Law French terms like *mestier* were not always rendered consistently across manuscripts, and variant spellings (including *mestier*, *mestyer*, and analogues drawn from Old French *mestier*) may appear. When indexing or searching historical sources, a search limited to one spelling may miss relevant passages.
The term has no surviving use in modern legal writing and will not appear in contemporary statutory or case law. Its relevance is confined to the interpretation of medieval English legal texts, particularly those in the Britton tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the principal anglophone legal dictionary treatment of this term, defining it as "business; occupation" and illustrating it with the phrase *un coroner que fuce le mestier de la corone* — "a coroner who shall attend to the affairs of the crown" — drawn from Britton, folio 2. The entry is brief but accurate in capturing the term's functional character: *mestier* describes what an officer *does*, not what an officer *is*.
Historical legal dictionaries beyond Burrill give the term little or no independent treatment, reflecting its status as vocabulary rather than doctrine. Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary, both significant shelf sources for Law French terminology, do not carry substantive entries for *mestier*, suggesting it was recognized as a lexical item requiring translation rather than as a concept requiring legal analysis. Burrill's entry, though sparse, is therefore the primary reference point available to researchers working with anglophone legal dictionary sources.
The Britton citation is significant. Britton is an anonymous late thirteenth-century treatise on English law, written in Law French and treating the law as pronounced in the voice of Edward I. It is an authoritative source for the vocabulary and conceptual framework of early English common law administration, and the passage Burrill quotes illustrates *mestier* in the context of coroner's duties — a fitting example, as the coroner's office was defined almost entirely by its functional obligations to the crown.