Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "above." Used in early English legal texts and records, *peramont* is a positional or hierarchical marker indicating superiority of rank, authority, or title. It is the etymological and functional equivalent of *paramount*, the form that displaced it entirely in modern legal usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal materials — plea rolls, land records, year books, or treatises predating the eighteenth century — may encounter *peramont* where a modern source would use *paramount*. The term carries no independent legal content beyond its successor: understanding it requires following the cross-reference to paramount and applying that concept fully.
The practical research risk is misreading or overlooking the word entirely. In manuscript sources or older printed law dictionaries, the spelling varies (*peramont*, *paramont*, *paramount*), and a researcher unfamiliar with the Law French form may not recognize the term or may fail to connect it to the paramount title or paramount lord analysis relevant to the dispute at hand.
Because *peramont* appears in feudal tenure contexts — questions of seisin, lord-tenant relationships, and priority of title — a researcher who encounters it in a historical source should immediately frame the inquiry around the hierarchy of feudal obligation or the superiority of title that *paramount* governs in later common law doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary disposes of *peramont* in a single line: "L. Fr. Above. Kelham. See Paramount." The entry is a pure cross-reference, citing Robert Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779) as the source authority and directing the reader forward to *paramount* without further elaboration. This is consistent with Burrill's general treatment of obsolete Law French terms — he records them for completeness but declines to develop doctrine around vocabulary that had already been absorbed into its English equivalent.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus include a dedicated entry for *peramont*. Its absence from Bouvier, Black, and similar references confirms that the term had ceased to appear in active legal sources long before those compilations were undertaken. Kelham remains the primary scholarly anchor for researchers needing to verify the word's meaning in a specific manuscript context.