Definition
A Law French verb meaning "to put," "to place," "to set," or "to fix." In legal usage, mettre appeared most commonly in procedural phrases signifying the act of submitting or placing oneself before a tribunal, jury, or country — that is, consenting to be tried by a particular mode of proceeding. It also carried a narrower logical sense: "to put" a hypothetical case for argument, equivalent to "suppose" or "admit for the sake of argument."
Key phrases in historical sources:
- Mettre en escript: to put in writing; to reduce to written form.
- Se pusse mettre en jure: may put himself on a jury; the act of a party submitting to jury trial.
- Si il se mette en pays: if he put himself on the country; i.e., if he elects trial by jury (the country) rather than some other mode.
- Mettons / Mettomus: put the case; suppose; let us admit — a framing device used in Year Book argument and early case reporting to introduce a hypothetical.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Mettre is a standard French verb meaning "to put," "to place," or "to set." It remains in everyday use in modern French with no special connotation.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry a separate entry for mettre as an English word, reflecting its status as a foreign-language borrowing rather than naturalized English vocabulary.
The gap worth noting: In ordinary French, mettre is purely directional or physical — placing an object somewhere. In Law French legal usage, the term acquired a technical procedural meaning: placing oneself before a court or jury signified a formal act of submission with legal consequences. A researcher encountering se mettre en pays in a medieval English legal record is reading a term of art for election of jury trial, not a casual spatial description.
Common Confusion
Mettre is closely related to, and easily confused with, its Latin cognate mittere (to send, to place, to put). Both appear in Burrill and in historical English legal sources, often in overlapping procedural contexts. The distinction matters: mittere and its derivatives (mittimus, remitter, demise from demittere) generated their own families of technical terms with distinct meanings. Researchers should treat mettre as the Law French form and consult the Mitter and Mittere entries separately. Burrill himself cross-references "See Mitter" at the close of the mettre entry, confirming the relationship without collapsing the two.
Why It Matters in Research
Mettre is an access term, not a doctrine. Its value to a corpus researcher lies in unlocking the procedural phrases built around it, which appear with some regularity in Year Book materials, Britton, and early English plea rolls.
The phrase se mettre en pays (putting oneself on the country) is among the most common procedural formulas in medieval English criminal and civil procedure. It signaled a defendant's election of jury trial and was the Law French equivalent of the later formal English expression "puts himself upon the country." Researchers working in pre-modern common law records who encounter any form of mettre in a pleading context should immediately consider whether a mode-of-trial election is being recorded.
The hypothetical use — mettons, mettomus — appears in Year Book argumentation and is stylistically significant. Year Book reporters used this formula to flag that counsel was positing a hypothetical variant to probe the court's reasoning, not asserting a fact. Misreading mettons as a factual statement rather than a dialectical device will distort the meaning of the passage.
Britton (cited in Burrill as fol. 1 and c. 15, c. 68) is the primary source for the procedural phrases. Dyer's Reports carry the mettomus form. Neither is freely navigable without understanding that these are shorthand procedural and argumentative markers, not substantive legal rules.
One historical trap: because mettre is Law French and mittere is Latin, both may appear in the same document — medieval English legal records frequently mixed register. Do not assume that a document using one form uses it exclusively.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source dictionary for this entry and provides a compact but serviceable treatment. Burrill correctly identifies the Law French origin (from Latin mittere), supplies the core procedural phrases with source citations to Britton and the Year Books, and cross-references Mitter. The entry is brief because mettre is fundamentally a vehicle for the phrases it generates rather than a freestanding doctrine.
What Burrill does not do — and what no historical dictionary at this level attempts — is explain the procedural significance of se mettre en pays within the larger architecture of trial by jury. The phrase's importance is doctrinal and historical, not definitional, and requires consultation of sources on medieval English trial procedure rather than the dictionary entry itself.
No other major historical dictionaries (Jacob, Tomlin, Bouvier) carry a standalone mettre entry of substance, which reflects the term's status as a functional building block rather than a discrete legal concept.