Definition
Per my is an obsolete Law French term, an archaic variant form of parmy (also spelled parmi), encountered in early English legal records. It appears in Year Book sources dating to the reign of Edward II and has no independent legal meaning separate from its parent form. The term functions solely as a spelling variant and carries no distinct doctrinal content.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering per my in manuscript sources, Year Book transcriptions, or early legal digests should treat it as equivalent to parmy and search under that headword for substantive content. The variation reflects the fluid orthography of Law French, where the same word could be rendered differently across scribes, copyists, and printed editions. No separate line of authority or technical usage developed under the per my spelling; it is a dead end as an independent research term.
Year Book materials from the early fourteenth century are among the most orthographically unstable sources in the Law Mind corpus. Variant spellings of Law French terms across this period are common and do not signal distinct legal concepts. A researcher who stops at per my without following the cross-reference to parmy will miss whatever substantive treatment that term receives in the dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only shelf source to record per my, and its entry is brief: the term is identified as an old form of parmy, citing Yearb. T. 1 Edw. II. 5. Burrill offers no doctrinal gloss and no further elaboration, which is itself informative — the term warranted inclusion only to prevent a lookup failure, not because it carries independent meaning. No other historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus appears to treat per my as a separate headword. The absence of entries in sources such as Cowell, Tomlin, or Bouvier confirms that the term never achieved independent circulation beyond its appearance in a single early Year Book passage.