Definition
A Law French term meaning to send back or remand. In historical English legal usage, *remaunder* denoted the act of returning a person — typically a prisoner or accused — to custody, or returning a matter to a lower tribunal or prior proceeding. It is the functional ancestor of the modern concept of remand, describing the judicial act of sending back rather than resolving a matter at the current stage.
The term does not carry independent technical weight in modern legal practice and appears almost exclusively in historical sources and antiquarian legal dictionaries. For practical purposes, *remaunder* is the archaic form of what modern courts accomplish through a remand order.
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Common Confusion
REMAUNDER vs. REMAND: These terms describe the same act at different points in legal history. *Remaunder* is the Law French form; *remand* is its direct modern English descendant. Researchers encountering *remaunder* in old English records, Year Books, or early treatises should read it as functionally equivalent to a remand. Confusion arises when researchers treat the two as distinct legal concepts rather than recognizing one as the historical precursor of the other. There is no meaningful substantive difference between the acts they describe.
REMAUNDER vs. REMAINDER: The visual and phonetic similarity to *remainder* — a common property law term — is a source of transcription and search error. These are entirely unrelated terms. *Remainder* derives from a different root and concerns future interests in property. *Remaunder* concerns the return of a person or cause. Researchers working with handwritten records should be alert to misreading or mistranscription between the two.
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Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of *remaunder* is recognition: when the term appears in a historical source, a researcher must know it signals a remand-type judicial act and not a property transaction or some other procedural step.
The term is characteristic of Law French legal vocabulary found in Year Books, early plea rolls, and the older English abridgments. Burrill cites Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779) as the authority, which tells a researcher where to look for further elaboration — not in substantive law treatises but in Law French lexicons and medieval records scholarship.
Because *remaunder* has no continuing independent life in common law jurisdictions, researchers will not find it in modern statutory or case law. Its appearance is a reliable marker that a source predates the full anglicization of English legal vocabulary, generally suggesting material from before the seventeenth century or a later work drawing on that tradition. Searches using *remand* or *remanded* will not retrieve historical documents using *remaunder*, and vice versa — a practical indexing trap in full-text corpus searches.
There is no meaningful jurisdictional variation to track because the term did not survive into the distinct American, Canadian, or Australian legal vocabularies. It remained anchored to the English common law tradition and faded with the displacement of Law French.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is spare: "L. Fr. To send back; to remand. Kelham." This brevity is itself informative. Burrill treats *remaunder* as a purely linguistic gloss on a known concept rather than as a term requiring substantive legal explanation, confirming that by the time of his compilation the term had no independent doctrinal content — its entire meaning was already captured by *remand*.
Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* remains the foundational source for Law French terms of this class, and Burrill's deferral to Kelham reflects standard nineteenth-century lexicographic practice for archaic Law French vocabulary. Other major historical dictionaries — including Bouvier, Black's early editions, and Jacob's *Law Dictionary* — do not carry a separate entry for *remaunder*, reinforcing that the term was recognized as obsolete rather than live even in the era of those compilations.
No historical dictionary source consulted offers substantive elaboration beyond the translation. Researchers should not expect to find developed case law or treatise discussion organized under this term heading.
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