Definition
An archaic Anglo-French and Old English term meaning resident or dwelling inhabitant. The word denotes a person who is physically present and settled in a particular place — specifically, one who dwells or resides in a given county or locality. The term appears in early English statutory language to identify persons by their place of habitual dwelling, particularly for purposes of jury selection, taxation, or local obligation.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current entry. The term is entirely obsolete in modern English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The word had already passed out of recognizable usage by the nineteenth century.
Editorial note: RESYAUNT is a phonetic rendering of the Anglo-French "resident" as it appeared in medieval English statutes. It carries no gap between its historical legal and common meanings — it simply meant a person who lives somewhere — but researchers encountering the term in manuscript or early printed sources may not recognize it as the functional equivalent of the modern word "resident."
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Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of RESYAUNT is paleographic and terminological: it signals that a document originates in the medieval or early Tudor period, when Anglo-French legal vocabulary was still being transcribed with phonetic English spellings. Researchers working in early English statutory materials, Year Books, or county administrative records should treat RESYAUNT as a direct equivalent of "resident" and not read into it any specialized legal meaning beyond habitual local presence.
The single surviving Burrill citation traces the term to a statute of Henry VIII (8 Hen., likely referencing an early Tudor parliamentary act concerning county administration or jury composition), which illustrates the transitional period when Anglo-French forms were giving way to English but had not yet standardized. Researchers should be aware that the same concept appears under multiple variant spellings in manuscripts of this era — RESIANT, RESIAUNTE, RESYANT — and that indexing in historical legal databases may not capture all variants. A search limited to one spelling will miss cognate uses.
For jury composition research in particular, "resyaunt in the same counties" language reflects the foundational principle that jurors be drawn from the locality where the matter arose — a requirement traceable through centuries of English law. The term therefore connects substantively to the history of the vicinage requirement, even though RESYAUNT itself carries no technical meaning beyond geographic presence.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the only shelf source to record this term, and his entry is spare: he identifies it as Law French and Old English, glosses it as "resident," and supplies the single statutory phrase "by people dwelling and resyaunt in the same counties" from 8 Hen. No further elaboration is offered.
The brevity is appropriate. RESYAUNT is not a term of art; it is a period spelling of an ordinary concept. Burrill's value here is confirmatory — giving researchers who encounter the word in a primary source the confidence that they are reading a residency reference, not a specialized legal category. No other major historical legal dictionary (Cowell, Jacob, Tomlin, Black's early editions) appears to have treated the term, likely because it was already archaic by the time those works were compiled.
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Jurisdictional Note
RESYAUNT appears exclusively in English legal sources and is confined to the medieval and early Tudor periods. It has no application in American, Scottish, or Irish legal materials except as a historical reference when those systems drew directly on early English statutory precedent.
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