Definition
An archaic Law French adverb meaning "namely" or "that is to say." Used in early English legal pleading and court records to introduce a specification, enumeration, or particularization of something previously stated in general terms. Functionally equivalent to the Latin "videlicet" (commonly abbreviated "viz.") and the Latin "scilicet" (abbreviated "ss." or "sc."), nosmement served as a verbal signal that what followed would identify, clarify, or narrow the preceding statement.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Year Book materials, early plea rolls, or any Anglo-Norman legal text from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries may encounter this term in its specifying function. Its presence signals that the text is moving from a general claim or allegation to a particularized one — a distinction that could carry real legal weight in pleading, where the degree of specificity required was itself a contested and evolving matter.
The term is almost exclusively a feature of Law French sources. By the time legal English displaced Law French in formal pleading following the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730, nosmement had already faded from active use, replaced functionally by "namely," "to wit," "viz.," and "scilicet" in English and Latin records respectively. Researchers who encounter it in transcriptions or abridgments should be aware that later editors sometimes silently rendered it as "namely" or "viz." without noting the substitution, which can create the false impression that a source was composed in a later period or in a different register than it actually was.
Because Burrill cites the Year Books — specifically Michaelmas Term, 2 Edward III — as his authority, this term anchors to approximately 1328. Researchers using the Year Books in original or in the standard Rolls Series edition should expect Law French of this period to deploy nosmement in contexts where modern editors or translators would write "namely" or "that is to say." Reading past it without recognizing its specifying function risks misreading the structure of the legal argument being recorded.
There is no modern procedural or substantive legal significance to this term. Its value is entirely historical and philological.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry in the Law Mind corpus for nosmement, defining it simply as "namely" with the Year Book citation. No further elaboration is offered, which is consistent with the term's status as a functional connector word rather than a term of legal art with contested meaning or doctrinal weight.
The major historical English law dictionaries — Cowell's Interpreter, Blount's Nomo-Lexikon, Jacob's Law Dictionary, and Tomlin's — do not appear to include separate entries for nosmement, likely because it was already archaic by the time those works were compiled. Its absence from those dictionaries is itself informative: it indicates the term had ceased to require explanation for practitioners of its own era and had simply been overtaken by equivalent Latin and English expressions.
Researchers should not expect cross-dictionary corroboration for this term. Burrill's entry, brief as it is, represents the primary lexicographic record available in standard common law reference works.
Jurisdictional Note
Nosmement is exclusively a term of English legal history. It appears in materials predating the full jurisdictional divergence of common law systems across the Anglophone world and carries no jurisdiction-specific variation.