Definition
Reconisaunce is a Law French term with two related but distinct meanings in medieval English legal usage. First, it denoted a recognizance — specifically, a formal obligation or acknowledgment to keep the peace, entered into before a court or magistrate. Second, it referred to the inquisition or verdict of an assize or jury, particularly the petty assize, which was conducted by twelve jurors to determine a plaintiff's right of possession in a land dispute.
The term is, in substance, an archaic orthographic and linguistic variant of RECOGNIZANCE, and its procedural application in the assize context reflects the central role of jury-based fact-finding in early English common law.
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Common Confusion
Reconisaunce should not be confused with its phonetic modern equivalent, recognizance, without attention to context. When encountered in medieval sources, the term may signal either a personal bond obligation (the peace-keeping sense) or a collective jury finding (the assize sense). Treating every instance as equivalent to a modern recognizance — a bail-like obligation — risks misreading procedural records in which the word instead describes a jury's determination of possessory right. The assize usage is the more distinctively medieval application and has no direct modern counterpart.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational hazard for researchers working in early English legal records, plea rolls, or Year Books. Its dual meaning — personal obligation on one hand, jury inquisition on the other — requires attention to surrounding context before any interpretive conclusion is drawn.
The assize meaning is the more historically specific and the more likely to catch researchers off guard. Burrill's quotation from Britton makes the application precise: a petty assize is a reconisaunce of twelve jurors concerning the plaintiff's right of possession. This situates the term squarely within the land law procedures of the thirteenth century, where the novel disseisin and other petty assizes were the dominant means of adjudicating possessory disputes. Researchers encountering reconisaunce in that context should read it as describing the jury mechanism of the assize, not a bail bond or peace-keeping recognizance.
Because the term appears primarily in Law French texts and early treatises such as Britton, it is unlikely to surface in post-medieval common law materials. Corpus searches should be calibrated accordingly: this is a term of medieval pleading and procedure, not of equity practice or later statutory law. Variant spellings are common in Law French sources, and reconisaunce may appear in forms such as recognisance, recognisaunce, or reconisance depending on the manuscript tradition.
Researchers using this term as a search string should also run parallel searches under RECOGNIZANCE to capture the broader lineage of the concept across later periods.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary shelf source providing a definition of this specific spelling, and his entry is concise but precise. He identifies both the peace-keeping obligation sense and the jury inquisition sense, and he grounds the assize definition in a direct quotation from Britton — one of the major thirteenth-century treatises on English law, attributed to or associated with the reign of Edward I. Burrill's citation to Britton c. 42 for the jury-inquisition sense is valuable because it anchors the term to a specific and authoritative early source.
No other historical dictionary in the standard shelf series — Tomlin, Bouvier, Black, Wharton — appears to carry this precise spelling as a separate entry; those works treat RECOGNIZANCE as the primary form and discuss its development from that headword. Burrill's treatment of reconisaunce as a standalone entry reflects his comparative thoroughness with Law French vocabulary, and it is among the more useful entries for researchers working in pre-Reformation English sources.
The Britton quotation Burrill preserves — "Petite assise est reconisaunce de xii jorours, del droit le pleyntyfe sur la possession" — is a clean illustration of how the term functioned procedurally: it is the reconisaunce (the jury's collective recognition or finding) that constitutes the assize, not merely the mechanism that summons it.
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Jurisdictional Note
Reconisaunce is a term of medieval English law and has no meaningful jurisdictional variation in the modern sense. It does not appear in American, Scottish, or civil law traditions as a term of art. Research use is confined to English common law sources predating the early modern period.
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