Definition
In Law French pleading, *prier* (also rendered *prioins* in the first-person plural) means "to pray" — that is, to formally request or petition a court for a specific remedy, ruling, or course of action. The term appears in early Year Book entries and reflects the formulaic language of medieval common law pleading, in which a party's demand was cast not as a command but as a supplication directed to the court. The cognate English term "prayer" (as in the prayer of a bill or complaint) descends directly from this usage and survives in modern civil procedure.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person who pries; one who inquires narrowly or intrusively into others' affairs.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "One who pries; one who inquires narrowly and searches, or is inquisitive."
The ordinary English word *prier* — a nosy or inquisitive person — shares no meaningful connection with the Law French term. A researcher encountering *prier* in a historical legal source should resist any instinct drawn from the common word. The legal term derives from Latin *precari* (to pray, to entreat) and is wholly unrelated to the act of prying or surveillance.
Common Confusion
*Prier* is easily misread in manuscript and early printed legal sources in two ways. First, it is sometimes confused with *prier* in the common English sense (to pry), producing a nonsensical reading. Second, it can be confused with *prior* (meaning "earlier" or referring to a monastic superior), particularly in sources where the terminal *e* and *o* are paleographically similar. In Law French contexts, the governing test is simple: *prier* followed by a statement of relief sought is always the pleading term meaning "to pray."
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Year Book materials, early Chancery records, or any Law French pleading source will encounter *prier* and its inflected forms (*prioins*, "we pray"; *prie*, "prays") as structural markers within the pleading. These words signal the precise moment at which a party articulates the relief requested — the equivalent of what modern practitioners call the "prayer for relief" in a complaint or petition.
Two practical traps arise. First, optical character recognition and early transcription of Year Book materials frequently misrender *prier* as *prior*, corrupting the legal sense entirely. When searching digitized historical corpora, researchers should run variant searches for both spellings. Second, the shift from Law French pleading language to English-language pleading (accelerated by the Pleading in English Act 1362 and largely complete by the eighteenth century) means that *prier* as a discrete term disappears from later sources even though its functional descendant — the prayer clause — persists and is indexed under entirely different vocabulary. A research trail that begins with *prier* in Year Book sources must pivot to "prayer," "praecipe," or "relief sought" when moving into post-medieval records.
The corpus connection to prayer-of-relief doctrine is direct: the substantive law governing what a court could be asked to do, and the procedural consequences of mis-stating the prayer, are traceable from these early Law French formulations forward through equity pleading and into the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical source supporting this entry and treats *prier* economically: "L. Fr. To pray. Prioins; we pray. Yearb. H. 1 Edw. II. 3." The entry is accurate as far as it goes but offers no substantive discussion of how the term functioned within the pleading system or how it relates to the developed doctrine of the prayer for relief. No other standard historical law dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions — carries a standalone *prier* entry, which itself signals how thoroughly the Law French vocabulary was absorbed and relabeled in English-language legal discourse. Researchers should not take the brevity of the historical record as evidence that the concept was minor; it was foundational, simply operating under a different name by the time the major dictionaries were compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
As a Law French pleading term, *prier* is specific to the English common law tradition and its direct descendants. It has no parallel usage in civil law or Scots law sources. American legal materials do not use *prier* as a term of art, though the prayer for relief it describes remains a universal feature of Anglo-American civil pleading.