Definition
An old English legal term denoting a forfeiture imposed upon a person for contempt or neglect in failing to pursue a malefactor. Under the English common law, the duty to raise the hue and cry — and more broadly to assist in the apprehension of criminals — was a communal obligation enforceable against individuals and communities alike. Oversamessa was the penalty, taking the form of a forfeiture, that attached when a person subject to that duty failed to fulfill it. The term belongs to the oldest stratum of English criminal procedure and has no living analog in modern law.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a historical artifact. Researchers will encounter it only in pre-modern English legal sources, primarily in discussions of the hue and cry, frankpledge, and communal criminal enforcement obligations that characterized Anglo-Saxon and early Norman law. Its sole surviving foothold in legal reference literature is the single citation — Coke's Institutes, 3 Inst. 116 — repeated without elaboration across all major historical dictionaries.
The key research trap is assuming this term refers to a general or flexible category of forfeiture. It is narrow and specific: the forfeiture attaches only to the dereliction of the duty to pursue a malefactor, not to contempt or neglect in other procedural contexts. Researchers working in medieval English legal history, or tracing the lineage of citizen-arrest obligations, posse comitatus doctrine, or the evolution of public duties in criminal law, may encounter this term as background. It has no meaningful jurisdictional variation in American law because it never crossed the Atlantic as an operative doctrine.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is notable for embedding oversamessa within a cluster of unrelated "overseer" entries, which reflects the alphabetical convenience of 19th-century legal dictionaries rather than any doctrinal connection. Researchers should not infer any relationship between oversamessa and the law of highway or public road overseers.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier — are in complete agreement, reproducing the same single-sentence definition and the same citation to Coke's Institutes (3 Inst. 116). This uniformity is itself informative: it indicates that none of the 19th-century lexicographers had access to, or found it necessary to consult, sources beyond Coke. The definition has not evolved across editions because the term was already a historical relic when these dictionaries were compiled.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any procedural context — who was subject to the duty, how the forfeiture was assessed, to whom it was paid, or how it related to parallel mechanisms like the amercement of townships for escape of felons. Researchers needing that context must go directly to 3 Inst. 116 and to secondary scholarship on Anglo-Norman criminal procedure.