Definition
In old English law, an exemption or acquittance from amercements arising out of plaints that were not regularly or properly preferred in a court. A person said to enjoy mishersing was relieved from financial penalties that would otherwise attach for defective or irregular pleading. The term belongs to the vocabulary of medieval English procedural law and has no modern operational equivalent.
Why It Matters in Research
Mishersing is a highly specialized term of medieval English court practice and will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern sources — records of manorial courts, royal writs, charters of franchise, and legal antiquarian compilations. Researchers encountering it in historical documents should understand it as a privilege or immunity, likely granted by royal charter or local custom, rather than a universal procedural rule.
The key research trap is treating mishersing as a general doctrine when it was almost certainly a specific franchise right. Charters granting exemptions from amercements were common instruments of royal favor, and mishersing may appear alongside similar franchise terms — such as infangenthef, outfangenthef, or toll and team — in lists of liberties. When found in such company, it should be read as one item in a bundle of jurisdictional privileges, not as a standalone procedural principle.
Burrill cites Spelman as his authority, meaning the ultimate source is Sir Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum, a seventeenth-century glossary of archaic legal and ecclesiastical terms. Any further research into mishersing should trace back through Spelman, keeping in mind that Spelman himself was working from medieval records at considerable historical distance. The chain of authority here is: modern legal dictionary → Spelman's glossary → underlying medieval sources, with each step introducing some inferential distance from primary texts.
No modern treatise, statute, or case law is expected to use this term. Its relevance is purely historical and linguistic.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only available definition within the Law Mind corpus: "the being quit of amercements for plaints in any courts, not regularly or properly preferred," citing Spelman. This is a characteristically terse entry of the kind Burrill reserves for obscure feudal terms where the historical record is thin and confident elaboration is impossible.
Burrill does not elaborate on which courts the privilege applied to, how it was acquired, or whether it was a common or exceptional right. The phrase "any courts" suggests it may have operated broadly across manorial, hundred, and royal court settings, but this cannot be confirmed from the entry alone.
The term does not appear in Bouvier's Law Dictionary or Black's Law Dictionary, which reflects both its obscurity and the fact that by the time American legal dictionaries were compiled, mishersing had long ceased to have any practical significance. Its absence from American sources is itself informative: this is a term that never crossed the Atlantic as an operative legal concept.
Jurisdictional Note
Mishersing is exclusively a term of historical English law. It has no recognized equivalent or analogue in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Research use is confined to medieval and early modern English legal history.