Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "a taking." In legal usage, *prisel* refers to the act of taking or receiving something in a formal procedural sense. The term appears in early English legal records principally in the phrase *le prisel del verdict* — the taking (or receipt) of a verdict — describing the formal act by which a court receives the jury's finding.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *prisel* will find it almost exclusively in early English Year Books, plea rolls, and reports from the medieval and early modern periods. The term is a relic of the Law French legal vocabulary that dominated English court practice from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. Its appearance is highly contextual: outside the phrase *le prisel del verdict*, it is rarely encountered as a standalone term.
The critical research trap is conflation with the procedurally and conceptually distinct term *prise* (also Law French, meaning a seizure or taking of goods, often by royal prerogative). The two share the same root and similar orthography but point to entirely different legal operations. A researcher finding *prisel* in a manuscript or early printed report should treat it as procedural language tied to verdict-taking, not to property seizure or prerogative taking.
Because the term survives almost nowhere outside the Dyer citation noted in Burrill, it functions less as a living doctrinal concept and more as a lexical artifact useful for decoding specific passages in pre-modern English legal reports. Researchers working in printed editions of Dyer's Reports should note that the cited passage appears in French-language editions; English-language editions may translate or obscure the term entirely.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole significant treatment of *prisel* among the standard historical legal dictionaries. Burrill defines it concisely as Law French for "a taking" and anchors the term with a single illustrative citation to Dyer 55b in the French edition. No additional contextual development is offered.
The brevity of Burrill's entry reflects the term's narrow footprint in the legal record. Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, and Bouvier's Law Dictionary do not appear to carry independent entries for *prisel*, and the term is absent from Black's early editions. This absence is itself instructive: *prisel* was sufficiently obscure even by the early nineteenth century that compilers of general legal dictionaries saw no need to include it. Burrill's entry survives primarily as a philological note rather than a guide to active doctrine.
The connection to Dyer's Reports is worth noting. Sir James Dyer was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas from 1559 to 1582, and his reports are among the most significant collections of sixteenth-century English case law. The French-edition citation confirms that *prisel* belongs to the Law French register still in active use during that period, even as English was beginning to displace Law French in legal writing.
Jurisdictional Note
*Prisel* is a term of English legal history with no direct American reception. It would not appear in colonial American or early federal legal sources, and no U.S. jurisdiction developed independent doctrine around it. Researchers encountering the term are working in English materials only.