Definition
A taker; one who takes or receives something. In Law French usage, *pernour* denotes the person who takes or receives property, profits, or an estate — as opposed to one who merely holds or detains it. The term appears principally in the paired phrase *le pernour ou le detenour* ("the taker or the detainer"), which distinguished between the party who actively took possession and the party who continued to hold it. Though the term itself is rarely encountered outside archaic pleading contexts, it signals a doctrinal distinction between the act of taking and the act of retaining.
Why It Matters in Research
*Pernour* is a term of pure historical artifact. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal texts — Year Books, early common law treatises, and the antique pleading literature that drew heavily on Law French vocabulary. Its presence in a source signals that the surrounding text is operating within the Law French pleading tradition, which should prompt attention to the conventions and formalism of that era.
The paired construction *pernour ou le detenour* is the operative context. When this phrase appears, the legal question at issue typically concerns who bears responsibility for a wrongful taking versus a wrongful retention — a distinction that carried procedural consequences in the forms of action. Detinue, for example, focused on one who detains; trespass focused on one who took. The *pernour/detenour* pairing maps onto that distinction and may appear in sources analyzing which action lies against which party.
Researchers using Law Mind's corpus of historical pleading materials, early treatise literature, or sources deriving from Britton should treat *pernour* as a flag term directing attention to possessory and property disputes in their earliest common law form. Because the word has no modern survival in American or contemporary English law, its presence reliably dates or characterizes a source.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources agree completely on the core definition — "a taker" — and all cite the same authority: Britton, chapter 27. This unanimity, without elaboration, is itself informative: *pernour* attracted no dispute and no competing definition across the dictionary tradition. The sources offer no expansion beyond the phrase *le pernour ou le detenour* and its translation.
Burrill's entry is notable for what surrounds it: the dictionary's text runs *pernour* directly into the maxim *Perpetua lex est nullam legem humanam ac positivam perpetuam esse* — an editorial adjacency of alphabetical coincidence, not legal connection. Researchers encountering Burrill's entry should not infer any relationship between the two passages. The maxim is an independent entry that happens to follow immediately in the printed text.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any discussion of how *pernour* functioned within the forms of action, any analysis of when the pernour/detenour distinction was outcome-determinative in pleading, or any guidance on the term's relationship to related possessory concepts. For that context, Britton itself and secondary literature on Law French pleading must be consulted directly.
Jurisdictional Note
*Pernour* is a term of English common law origin and has no recognized presence in American statutory or case law. Its relevance is confined to historical English legal materials and scholarship derived from them.