Definition
An archaic Law French adverb meaning "lately," "not long since," or "sometimes." The term appears in medieval English legal records and pleadings where Law French was the operative language of procedure. It carried temporal significance — signaling that a referenced act, status, or condition had occurred or existed in the recent past, though not necessarily at the precise moment of pleading.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A given name, functioning as either a masculine diminutive of Nathaniel or Nathan, or a feminine diminutive of Natasha or Natalie; also a surname.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An obsolete form of "not," noted in Chaucer.
The gap here is total. The common word "nat" as recorded by Webster's is a negation — meaning "not." The legal term "nat" is an affirmation of temporal recency — meaning "lately." A researcher encountering "nat" in a Law French legal record must suppress both the naming sense and the Chaucerian negation sense entirely, as neither bears any relationship to the term's legal function.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English plea rolls, Year Books, or documents referencing the Articles upon the Charters (Articuli super Cartas) will encounter Law French vocabulary in which nat performs a quiet but meaningful role. Its temporal signal — "lately" or "not long since" — could affect how a court construed whether a prior act was sufficiently recent to be operative or relevant.
The critical trap is the Webster's 1913 entry. A researcher unfamiliar with Law French who encounters "nat" in a legal document and consults a general historical English dictionary will find "not" — the exact opposite of what the term means in legal context. This is a false friend that can invert the meaning of a sentence entirely.
Burrill's notation that nat can also mean "sometimes" introduces additional ambiguity: the term may shade from strict temporal recency into a softer frequentative sense depending on context. Researchers should not assume a single consistent meaning across all documents.
The reference anchor in Burrill — Articuli super Cartas, chapter 17, with Kelham cited as secondary authority — gives researchers a documentary entry point. Robert Kelham's Dictionnaire de la langue franque, ou petit dictionnaire du vieux langage français (1779), which Burrill draws on extensively, is the primary historical glossary for Law French terms of this kind and should be consulted alongside Burrill for any disputed reading.
Because nat is a function word rather than a term of art, it rarely appears as an index entry in case digests or legal encyclopedias. Researchers will encounter it embedded in quoted Law French passages, not as a headword in finding aids.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole dictionary source providing a legal definition, and it is brief: "L. Fr. Lately; not long since; sometimes." The citation to Articuli super Cartas and to Kelham is sparse but reliable as a directional reference. Burrill does not elaborate on cases or contexts where the distinction between "lately" and "sometimes" became legally significant, which leaves a genuine gap in the scholarly record.
No other dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — including Black's, Bouvier's, or Tomlin's — appears to carry an entry for nat in this Law French sense. This is consistent with the term's status as a minor function word rather than a doctrinal concept. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as the definitive available authority and supplement it with Kelham directly where precision is required.