Definition
A prjefine (also rendered as præfine or prefine) is a fee paid upon suing out the writ of covenant, which was the initiating procedural step in the common law process of levying a fine. The fee was due before the fine itself was passed — that is, before the collusive court judgment that formally transferred or settled title to land was entered. It was a preliminary payment exacted by the court as a condition of proceeding with the fine.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will almost certainly find it only in sources dealing with the medieval and early modern English land conveyancing system, particularly the procedure of fines and recoveries. The term is archaic even by the standards of nineteenth-century legal dictionaries and has no practical application in modern law following the abolition of fines and recoveries in England by statute in 1833.
The spelling variation is a significant trap. Historical sources render the word inconsistently — prjefine, præfine, and prefine all appear across different editions and manuscripts. Searching a single spelling in historical corpus materials may return incomplete results. The ligature præ- common in Latin-derived legal terms is frequently transcribed as pre- in printed sources and digitized texts, and the unusual prj- rendering in Black's likely reflects a typesetting artifact from the original print source rather than a deliberate spelling.
The term appears in close proximity to related procedural vocabulary — writ of covenant, note of the fine, foot of the fine, and concord — all of which are components of the same conveyancing transaction. A researcher unfamiliar with the anatomy of a common law fine may not immediately recognize prjefine as referring to a fee rather than a stage of the proceeding itself. It is strictly a payment obligation, not a document or pleading.
Because the fee was collected before the fine was passed, it would appear in court fee schedules, exchequer records, and procedural manuals of the relevant period rather than in the substantive record of any particular fine. Researchers working in English legal history before the nineteenth century should look for prjefine in the context of court costs and clerks' fees rather than in conveyancing instruments proper.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the only recorded definition in the Law Mind corpus: "The fee paid on suing out the writ of covenant, on levying fines, before the fine was passed," citing 2 Blackstone's Commentaries 350. The citation to Blackstone is the authoritative anchor point. Blackstone situates the prjefine within his systematic account of the fine as a mode of conveyance, describing the sequential steps by which a collusive action at law was used to transfer or settle an estate in land. The prjefine was the court's toll at the threshold of that process.
No other historical dictionary in the standard shelf — Bouvier, Burrill, Tomlin — appears to carry a distinct entry for this term, suggesting it was treated as sufficiently obscure or technical that only the supplemental apparatus of Black's captured it directly. The absence from Bouvier is notable given that Bouvier's Law Dictionary (1856 edition) treats the broader subject of fines and recoveries in some depth; the omission of prjefine as a discrete entry suggests the term had already become a historical curiosity by the mid-nineteenth century in American legal practice, where the fine as a conveyancing device was never adopted with the same institutional weight as in England.
Jurisdictional Note
The prjefine is exclusively an English common law term. American jurisdictions did not develop the fine and recovery system to a degree that would have made this fee operative in practice. Researchers working in American historical sources will not encounter it except in treatises or digests drawing on English authority.