Definition
A meynpernour is an archaic Law French term for a mainpernor — a person who acts as surety by taking another into their custody and undertaking to produce them when required. The meynpernour's obligation was to guarantee the appearance of the person for whom they stood surety, typically in a legal proceeding, under the process known as mainprise. Failure to produce the person could expose the meynpernour to forfeiture or other liability.
Common Confusion
MEYNPERNOUR, MAINPERNOR, AND BAIL: These terms are frequently treated as interchangeable in historical sources, but a meaningful distinction existed in classical common law. A mainpernor (meynpernour) took the person into their personal custody and guaranteed appearance, whereas bail received the person into their custody under a formal bond. The mainpernor's liability was generally personal rather than financial in the first instance, and the process of mainprise was available in some circumstances where bail was not, and vice versa. Modern legal systems have largely collapsed this distinction, making the difference invisible in contemporary practice but significant when reading historical pleadings, writs, or treatises.
Why It Matters in Research
MEYNPERNOUR is a spelling variant encountered in Law French sources and early English legal manuscripts. Researchers working with medieval and early modern legal records — plea rolls, year books, abridgments, or treatises like Britton — may encounter this spelling rather than the more familiar MAINPERNOR. The two are the same office; the variation is orthographic, reflecting the fluid spelling conventions of Law French and early legal English.
The key navigational point: catalog and index searches for MAINPERNOR will not reliably surface sources that use MEYNPERNOUR, and vice versa. Researchers examining original or transcribed records from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries should search under both forms, as well as variant spellings such as MAYNPERNOUR, MEYNPERNOR, and MAINPERNOUR.
Burrill's sole note — pointing to Britton, chapters 1 and 21 — is the thread researchers should pull. Britton is an anonymous thirteenth-century English legal treatise written in Law French, and it is one of the principal primary sources for understanding mainprise as a procedural device of medieval English law. The chapters cited address criminal procedure and suretyship in ways that illuminate both the role of the meynpernour and the conditions under which mainprise was ordered rather than bail.
The term has no living legal significance. Its research value is entirely historical: it appears in the source materials, and a researcher who does not recognize it as a form of MAINPERNOR may mistake it for a distinct or unknown office.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is a bare cross-reference: "A mainpernor. Britt. c. 1, 21." This is not an oversight on Burrill's part — the entry's only purpose is to flag the spelling variant and redirect. Burrill does not attempt a substantive definition here because the substance lives under MAINPERNOR.
Historical legal dictionaries generally handle MAINPERNOR with more depth, addressing the distinction from bail, the nature of the surety's custody, and the writ of mainprise. Researchers seeking doctrinal content should move directly to those entries rather than expecting to find it under the variant spelling. What historical dictionaries as a class tend to underserve is the range of spelling variation found in primary sources: MEYNPERNOUR is one of several forms, and no single dictionary catalogs them all systematically. Britton itself, in its original Law French, is the most reliable anchor for understanding what the office entailed and how it was distinguished from related suretyship mechanisms.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Mainprise; Bail and Suretyship in Medieval English Law.