Definition
In Roman and medieval Latin legal usage, *projicere* means "to cast" or "to throw." In the specific procedural context preserved in Burrill, the term refers to the act of casting or lodging an essoin — that is, formally presenting an excuse for a party's absence from court. The term is drawn directly from Latin and appears in the formulaic language of early English common law pleading and procedure, where essoin practice was conducted in set verbal and written forms.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): *Projicere* is a Latin verb meaning to throw forward, cast out, or project. It has no standard entry in modern English common usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry a separate entry for *projicere* as an English word, reflecting its treatment as a purely Latin term rather than an anglicized legal term.
The gap here is not between legal and common meaning but between the general Latin sense (to throw or cast outward) and the narrow procedural application in medieval English law, where "casting" an essoin was a formal legal act with defined procedural consequences — not a casual or physical act but a technical submission to the court.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear in researchers only in highly specific contexts: Latin-language pleading records, Year Books, and treatises on early common law procedure — most notably Fleta, which Burrill's source line references directly (Fleta, lib. 6, c. 10, § 12). Researchers encountering *projicere* in manuscript or early printed sources should understand they are looking at the technical vocabulary of essoin procedure, not a general term of art with broad application.
The primary trap is treating the word as a general Latin descriptor and missing its procedural force. In essoin practice, "casting" an essoin was a formalized act by which an excuse for absence (illness, being on crusade, being across the sea) was presented and entered into the court's process. The verb *projicere* captures the act of lodging that excuse — a step with genuine procedural consequences, including delay of proceedings.
Researchers using Law Mind sources should connect this term directly to entries on essoins, absence, and the early common law procedural structure of the King's courts. The term will not appear in modern legal materials and has no surviving procedural cognate in contemporary practice.
Because the term is preserved almost exclusively through Fleta and similar treatises of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, its appearance in a source is itself a dating and genre indicator. Finding *projicere* in a legal text strongly suggests either a pre-fifteenth-century origin or a later scholar working directly from those classical common law authorities.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is spare: "L. Lat. tice. To cast (an essoin.) Fleta, lib. 6, c. 10, § 12. In old prac—" — the fragment suggests the entry was truncated at the column or page boundary in the source text, and the full elaboration on old practice procedure was cut. What survives is sufficient to establish the term's function and source.
No other historical dictionaries in the current Law Mind shelf carry this term, which is consistent with its extreme technical specificity. Tomlin's, Bouvier's, and Black's later dictionaries largely abandoned the deepest stratum of medieval Latin procedural vocabulary unless the terms had continuing relevance. *Projicere* had none — essoin procedure in its classical Latin form was obsolete by the time those dictionaries were compiled.
The Fleta citation is the authoritative locus. Fleta is a late thirteenth-century Latin treatise on English law, composed around 1290, and is among the handful of sources that preserve this level of procedural Latin vocabulary in systematic form. Any researcher pursuing the term further should go directly to Fleta, book 6, as the primary source.
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Jurisdictional Note
Relevant only to English legal history. This term has no equivalent application in civil law jurisdictions, and no American jurisdiction inherited essoin procedure in a form that preserved the Latin terminology.
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