Definition
An obsolete term from old English law denoting leather, a hide, or an animal skin. The term appears in early Year Book records and reflects the importance of leather as a commodity in medieval English commerce and trade regulation.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering QUYR in medieval English legal records—particularly Year Books, manor court rolls, trade regulations, or plea rolls—should recognize it as a commodity term rather than a term of legal art with doctrinal significance. Its appearance most commonly signals a dispute or transaction involving leather goods, hides, or the hide trade, which was a heavily regulated industry in medieval England subject to guild controls, assize regulations, and customs duties.
The term is orthographically unstable in manuscript sources. Variant spellings reflecting the Anglo-Norman and Latin roots (corium in Latin; cuir in French) may appear interchangeably or alongside QUYR depending on the scribe, the court, and the period. Researchers using full-text search tools should run parallel searches for corium, cuir, and phonetic variants to avoid missing relevant records. A search that returns only QUYR will likely be incomplete.
The practical trap in historical research is treating QUYR as legal jargon when it is better understood as a technical trade or commodity term that happened to appear in legal proceedings. Its significance in any given document depends entirely on context: was it the subject of a debt claim, a customs dispute, a guild prosecution, or a property matter? The legal framework surrounding it—not the word itself—carries the doctrinal weight.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary treatment of this term, offering a concise and accurate identification: the Law French term, derived from the Latin corium, meaning leather, hide, or skin, with a single citation to the Year Books (H. 6 Edw. II. 192). Burrill does not elaborate on doctrinal significance, which is appropriate—this is a commodity descriptor, not a term around which legal doctrine developed.
No other shelf dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to have treated QUYR as a standalone entry, which is itself informative. The term's absence from later legal dictionaries (including those of Jacob, Tomlin, and Black) suggests it dropped from legal usage as Law French receded and trade records shifted to English. Researchers should not expect the term to persist beyond the Year Book period in any recognizable form.