Definition
An archaic Law French term equivalent to MAINOUR — the stolen goods found in the possession of a thief at the time of arrest. The concept captures the evidentiary condition of being caught with the physical object of a crime in hand or on one's person, which in early English criminal procedure had procedural consequences for how the accused was tried and detained.
Common Confusion
MEYNOVERE and MAINOUR are the same legal concept. Researchers should not treat them as distinct terms or attempt to locate independent authority for MEYNOVERE. All substantive doctrine — the significance of being taken with the mainour, its procedural effects, and its relationship to the older forms of criminal trial — is found under MAINOUR and its recognized variants.
Why It Matters in Research
MEYNOVERE is encountered almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal texts written in or influenced by Law French. Researchers should treat it as a variant spelling pointing directly to MAINOUR, and any analysis of its legal significance must be conducted under that heading. The term itself carries no independent doctrinal content — it is purely a linguistic variant. If you encounter MEYNOVERE in a primary source, the operative question is what the source says about the underlying concept of possession of stolen goods at arrest, not the spelling of the word used.
Spelling variation in Law French legal terms is pervasive and can obscure cross-references. Historical indexes and digests may catalogue this concept under MAINOUR, MAYNOUR, MANOVERE, or other forms depending on the scribe, printer, or editor. A researcher relying on a single spelling will miss parallel passages. Keyword searching in historical corpus materials should account for this range.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary identifies MEYNOVERE simply as the same term as MAINOUR, treating it as a direct orthographic variant without further elaboration. This minimal entry is characteristic of how historical law dictionaries handled Law French spelling variants — acknowledgment of equivalence rather than independent treatment. Burrill's approach is correct: the substantive legal content belongs to MAINOUR, and MEYNOVERE is a pointer entry.
Historical dictionaries generally do not trace the phonological or scribal reasons for variant spellings in Law French, which limits their usefulness for understanding how these forms arose. Researchers working with manuscript sources will need to rely on specialized glossaries of Law French and medieval legal Latin for that level of analysis.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See the Law Mind Encyclopedia entry for MAINOUR for the full treatment of this concept, including its role in early English criminal procedure and its doctrinal relationship to arrest and detention.