Definition
A Law French particle meaning "put," "placed," "sent," or "inserted." Mys appears in medieval Anglo-Norman legal texts as a past participial form derived from the verb *mitter* (to put or send), and functions grammatically as a modifier indicating that a person or thing has been placed into a particular condition, location, or legal status. It does not stand alone as a legal concept but operates as a component of fixed Law French phrases found in early English legal records, plea rolls, and statutes.
Principal attested phrases include:
1. Mys à lour penaunce — put to their penance; used in ecclesiastical and criminal contexts to indicate that a party has been subjected to a penitential or punitive proceeding.
2. Mys en ferges — put in irons; a phrase indicating physical restraint or imprisonment with fetters, appearing in early criminal procedure.
3. P'oles mys en escritz — words put in writing; used to describe the reduction of spoken or oral matter to a written instrument, carrying significance in evidentiary and contractual contexts.
4. Que date soit mys del jour — that a date be put in of the day; a drafting instruction in instruments requiring the insertion of a specific date.
5. Mys en la gaole — put in gaol; indicating commitment to prison.
6. Mys en certaine — put in certain; indicating that a matter has been fixed, specified, or reduced to a definite statement or sum.
The primary source for all attested usages is Britton, the late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman treatise on English law, along with early reports such as Dyer.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "mys" is the plural of "my," a first-person possessive pronoun. The form appears in informal or stylized contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not independently defined; would be treated as a nonstandard or archaic spelling variant without legal significance.
The gap between ordinary usage and legal usage here is total rather than partial. The common English "mys" is a grammatical form of a pronoun. The legal "mys" is a Law French past participle with no functional overlap. Researchers encountering "mys" in early English legal manuscripts should not interpret it through any English grammatical lens.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Mys is a paleographic and philological trap rather than a substantive legal concept. Researchers working with manuscript plea rolls, early printed abridgments, or transcriptions of Britton, Bracton-era materials, or Year Books will encounter mys embedded in longer phrases. Its significance is entirely contextual: the legal weight lies in the phrase it anchors, not in mys itself.
Key navigational points:
First, mys is not indexed as a standalone term in most legal dictionaries because it is a grammatical particle, not a term of art. Burrill's is unusual in giving it a discrete entry. Researchers who cannot identify mys as Law French for "put" may misread the operative phrase entirely — for instance, mistaking a commitment to prison (mys en la gaole) for something other than incarceration.
Second, Law French orthography is inconsistent across manuscript traditions. Variant spellings such as mis, miz, or mys may appear interchangeably in different hands or printed editions. Do not treat spelling variation as evidence of different terms.
Third, the phrase mys en certaine appears in the early English reporters, notably Dyer, in a context suggesting legal certainty or specificity of pleading. Researchers using Dyer in the Law Mind corpus should be alert to this phrase when tracing early pleading requirements around certainty of allegation.
Fourth, the Latin homograph mys (meaning sea-mussel, from Greek) has no legal relevance whatsoever and will not appear in legal sources. Encountering mys in a natural history or medical text from the same period is an entirely different word.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only shelf source to give mys a dedicated entry, and it does so efficiently: it supplies the linguistic root, a translation, and six attested phrases with citations to Britton and Dyer. Burrill correctly identifies mys as Law French derived from *mitter* and correctly notes its past participial function.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions, not Tomlin's — appear to index mys as a headword. This is consistent with its nature as a functional particle rather than a term of art. Researchers relying on dictionaries that lack a Law French component will find no help there.
Britton itself, the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman compilation attributed to John le Breton, is the authoritative source for the phrases Burrill cites. The chapters Burrill references (cc. 4, 11, 39, 100) address penance, imprisonment, written instruments, and gaol delivery respectively — contexts in which the act of placing a person or thing into a legal state was procedurally significant.
What historical sources do not do is synthesize mys within a broader analysis of Law French grammar in English legal records. For that, researchers must consult specialized philological works on Anglo-Norman legal language.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Mys and the phrases built on it are exclusively features of early English law as recorded in Anglo-Norman sources. They have no independent life in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. American researchers will encounter mys only when working with English sources predating the decline of Law French in legal practice (roughly the late seventeenth century).
---