Definition
A Law French term meaning delay or a putting off of proceedings. In historical legal usage, *respi* denoted the postponement or continuance of a legal proceeding, judgment, or obligation to a later time. It functions as a compressed ancestor of the more familiar English legal concepts of continuance, respite, and stay, capturing the idea that some legal act, deadline, or execution has been deferred by authority of the court or by agreement of the parties.
Common Confusion
*Respi* is easily conflated with *respite* and, less directly, with *continuance* and *stay*. The confusion is historically warranted because these terms overlap in meaning, but they are not interchangeable in all contexts. *Respite* in English legal usage acquired additional specific applications — notably the respite of homage and the respite of execution in capital cases — that give it a somewhat broader scope than the bare procedural delay captured by *respi*. Researchers should not treat *respi* as simply an archaic spelling of *respite*; the Law French form is a term of art belonging to a specific documentary tradition.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *respi* will find it almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records, Year Books, and Law French pleading manuals. The term has no independent survival in modern legal usage; it was absorbed entirely into English-language equivalents — chiefly *respite*, *continuance*, and *stay* — during the transition away from Law French as the working language of English courts, a process largely complete by the mid-eighteenth century.
The practical trap for corpus researchers is terminological fragmentation: a single procedural concept — postponement — appears in historical sources variously as *respi*, *respite*, *continuance*, *adjournment*, *stay*, and *supersedeas*, depending on the era, jurisdiction, and nature of the proceeding. A search confined to any one of these terms will miss the others. When reading Law French sources or abstracts of medieval plea rolls, *respi* should trigger a search expansion to its English successors. Conversely, when tracing the history of *respite* or *continuance*, historical sources predating the seventeenth century may use *respi* rather than the familiar English form.
The term also has a narrower specialized application in older sources: *respi de homage*, the postponement of homage owed by a feudal tenant to a lord. Researchers working in feudal land tenure history should be alert to this compound usage, which appears in records concerning the feudal incidents of tenure rather than in purely procedural contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry: "L. Fr. Delay; putting off," citing Kelham's *Law French Dictionary* as the authority. This is a characteristically lean historical entry — accurate as far as it goes but offering no procedural context, no illustration of use in pleading or record, and no connection to the English successors of the term.
Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779), the source Burrill cites, remains the primary reference for Law French legal vocabulary of this kind. Researchers who need to go deeper than Burrill's one-line gloss should consult Kelham directly, as well as Cowell's *Interpreter* and Termes de la Ley for cognate terms. None of these historical sources trace the procedural mechanics of how a *respi* was granted or recorded, leaving that reconstruction to the plea rolls and Year Books themselves.
What the historical dictionaries uniformly omit is any discussion of the transition: they record the Law French form without noting that *respite* — its direct English derivative — was already in common legal use alongside it and would eventually displace it entirely.
Jurisdictional Note
*Respi* is a term of English legal provenance with no independent counterpart in other common law jurisdictions. American, Canadian, and Australian legal sources do not use it. It is relevant only to research into English legal history, particularly records predating the eighteenth century.