Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "to take." In medieval English legal usage, *parner* (also encountered in variant forms) denoted the act of taking or receiving, most commonly appearing in statutory and pleading contexts concerned with the unlawful or excessive taking of toll. The term has no operative meaning in modern law and survives only as a philological artifact in older legal texts and their glossaries.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *parner* in pre-modern English legal sources — particularly in transcriptions of statutes, plea rolls, or legal treatises from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries — should recognize it immediately as Law French vocabulary, not a cognate of any modern English legal term. Its primary documented appearance is in the context of the Statute of Westminster I (1275), specifically a provision addressing parties who "take excessive or exorbitant toll" (*de ceux queux parnent outragious tolnet*). A researcher working backward from modern toll or customs law who stumbles across this term in a historical source may not recognize it as a verb form at all, given how far Law French vocabulary has receded from legal practice.
Two traps are worth flagging:
First, do not confuse *parner* with *parcener* or *parcenary*, which are entirely distinct terms of art relating to co-inheritance. The visual similarity can mislead researchers skimming dense Law French passages.
Second, Law French terms of this vintage were not always spelled consistently across manuscripts or printed editions. Variant spellings in primary sources are common. Burrill's rendering should be treated as one standardized form, not the exclusive form, for search and index purposes.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term, defining it tersely as Law French for "to take" and anchoring it to the Statute of Westminster I, chapter 31. The entry is brief by necessity: *parner* is a functional verb in a specific statutory phrase rather than a developed legal concept with doctrine built around it. Burrill cites the phrase *de ceux queux parnent outragious tolnet* as the operative context, which translates roughly to "of those who take excessive or exorbitant toll."
No elaboration appears in Burrill beyond this single illustrative usage. That narrowness is accurate — the term does not appear to have generated commentary or common law doctrine in its own right; it is the surrounding statutory provision, not the word itself, that carried legal significance. Researchers should not expect to find richer treatment in other historical dictionaries from this corpus era, as Law French vocabulary entries of this type were often included for completeness rather than practical guidance even at the time of publication.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs exclusively to the historical English legal tradition. It has no equivalent usage, residual application, or independent doctrinal presence in American, Commonwealth, or civil law jurisdictions.
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