Definition
A Law French adverb meaning "safely." Appears in historical legal texts as a modifier indicating that something — typically a person, goods, or property — is or must be held, kept, or conveyed without harm or loss. The phrase *sauvement gardes* (safely kept) is its most recorded legal application, appearing in early English legal writing to describe the obligation of safe custody.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The word is not in active modern English use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term was already archaic or specialized by the nineteenth century.
Editorial note: *Sauvement* is pure Law French with no surviving common English counterpart. Its plain semantic content — "safely" — is straightforward, but the word itself would be invisible to any researcher unfamiliar with the Law French lexicon.
Common Confusion
*Sauvement* is occasionally confused with *salvement* or conflated with the Latin *salvo* and its derivatives. The underlying meaning is the same ("safely," "without loss"), but the forms belong to different linguistic registers: Law French (*sauvement*, *sauver*) versus Latin (*salvo*, *salvus*). In a mixed-language document — not uncommon in medieval English legal records — the same concept may appear in either register within a few lines. Researchers should not treat the different word-forms as signaling different legal standards.
Why It Matters in Research
*Sauvement* is a navigational term: it rarely appears as a legal concept in its own right, but it surfaces as a modifier inside longer phrases that do carry legal weight. The chief research risk is misreading or skipping it entirely when encountered in transcriptions of early Year Books, plea rolls, or treatises drawing on those sources.
The phrase *sauvement gardes* connects directly to the law of custody and bailment as understood in medieval English law. Researchers tracing the history of safe-keeping obligations — whether in the context of custody of persons, goods in the hands of a bailee, or prisoners held pending trial — may encounter this phrase as shorthand for the standard of care owed. The single source text all three historical dictionaries cite, *Britton* (c. 87), is a late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise attributed to John le Breton, summarizing English common law as of the reign of Edward I. That work is written throughout in Law French, so *sauvement* and similar adverbs appear frequently as structural modifiers.
For corpus researchers: when searching historical legal databases for custody-related language, the Latin equivalent *salvo* and the English "safely" will surface many more documents than *sauvement* alone. Cross-searching the Law French and Latin registers is essential for complete coverage of this conceptual territory in pre-modern sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's — give identical treatment: the term is defined simply as "safely," with *sauvement gardes* ("safely kept") offered as the illustrative phrase, and *Britton* c. 87 as the lone citation. There is no meaningful divergence among the sources; the entry appears to have been carried forward without independent research across editions.
What the historical dictionaries do not do is situate *sauvement* within a broader discussion of safe-custody doctrine or connect it explicitly to related Law French terms (*garde*, *sauf conduit*, *salvement*). Researchers should treat these dictionary entries as identification aids — confirming what the word means when encountered — rather than as gateways to substantive doctrine.