Definition
Pur ceo que (also written pur coe ke) is a Law French phrase meaning "for this that," "forasmuch as," "inasmuch as," or "because." It functioned as a connective or causal conjunction in medieval English legal instruments, pleadings, and records — appearing wherever a scribe needed to introduce a recital, state a reason, or establish the factual or legal predicate for what followed. The phrase is the Law French rendering of the Latin pro eo quod, carrying the same logical function: linking a stated fact or condition to its legal consequence.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The phrase has no current common usage in English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The phrase was confined to legal and scribal contexts even in its active period.
Editorial note: Because pur ceo que has no common-language counterpart at any period, the term is pure legal jargon. No meaningful gap between legal and common meaning exists — the phrase simply has no life outside legal and administrative documents of the medieval English tradition.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval English legal manuscripts, year books, plea rolls, or early statutory instruments will encounter pur ceo que as a structural marker. Its presence signals that what follows is either a recital of fact, an assigned reason, or the causal premise for a grant, condition, or legal obligation. Recognizing the phrase helps a reader parse the logical architecture of a document without mistaking the recital clause for the operative clause.
Two practical traps arise in historical sources. First, spelling is inconsistent even within single documents: pur ceo que, pur coe ke, pur ceo ke, and variant forms all appear, and a search limited to one spelling will miss others. Second, because Law French and Latin were used interchangeably in the same instrument, researchers should also watch for pro eo quod and quoniam performing identical functions in adjacent clauses of the same text.
The phrase is not confined to any single document type. Burrill's example — Et pur ceo que damage purra avener à nous — comes from Britton, a late thirteenth-century treatise on English law compiled in Law French. The phrase also appears in confirmations of charters (as noted by Burrill's reference to Conf. Cartar. 25 Edw. I) and in plea roll entries where a party or a court states the grounds for a judgment or order. Understanding the phrase is therefore relevant across treatise literature, royal records, and private instruments of the period.
For corpus researchers, pur ceo que is less a substantive legal concept than a grammatical key to reading primary sources. Its identification is the first step in locating the reason clause within a complex medieval sentence, which in turn reveals the legal justification the drafter intended to record.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary dictionary source for this phrase and provides the essential information concisely. He identifies the Law French origin, supplies the Latin equivalent (pro eo quod), gives the translation range (forasmuch as; inasmuch as; because; considering that), and illustrates usage with a quotation from Britton together with a reference to a Confirmation of Charters from the twenty-fifth year of Edward I.
No significant divergence among historical dictionaries can be assessed from the available sources, as pur ceo que does not appear to have attracted extended treatment elsewhere. The phrase was sufficiently well understood by practitioners of its era that it needed no elaborate glossing; its appearance in Burrill reflects a nineteenth-century lexicographer cataloguing Law French remnants that had by then passed entirely out of active use.
What historical dictionaries collectively do not supply is any account of how the phrase behaved syntactically across different document genres, or how its frequency changed across the Law French period. That interpretive layer must be developed from primary source reading rather than from dictionary reliance.
Jurisdictional Note
Pur ceo que belongs to the Law French tradition of medieval England and has no meaningful parallel usage in other legal systems. Researchers working with Scottish, Irish, or continental European sources from the same period should look for functionally equivalent phrases in those traditions rather than expecting direct terminological correspondence.