Definition
An archaic legal term with two distinct uses in historical English and Norman-French legal contexts:
1. Ordinance or statute. In its primary legal sense, sement (also rendered as establissement in Norman-French sources) denoted a formal ordinance or statute, used especially of the legislative enactments passed during the reign of Edward I of England (r. 1272–1307). This was a period of prolific royal legislation that produced foundational common law statutes, and the term was used to describe these instruments of public governance.
2. Trading establishment of a government. By extension, the term was applied to describe institutions or establishments set up for public or private use, including the commercial or trading establishments of a governing authority.
3. Settlement of dower. In a third, narrower application, the term (in the form establissement) described the act by which a husband settled dower upon his wife — that is, the formal conveyance or assignment of a widow's portion of the marital estate.
Common Confusion
The term sement has no meaningful foothold in modern legal usage and should not be confused with later, more familiar doctrines that occupy its conceptual space. The first meaning — ordinance or statute — is entirely superseded by modern statutory terminology. The third meaning — dower settlement — overlaps with dower, curtesy, and jointure as used in later common law, but sement carries a specifically Norman-French procedural connotation tied to the formulaic acts of assignment recognized in Britton and related sources. Researchers encountering the term in a medieval text should resist mapping it directly onto any modern equivalent without first identifying which of the three senses is operative.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in medieval English legal sources, particularly those originating in or commenting upon the Edwardian legislative period (late 13th century). Researchers working with early common law materials — Year Books, treatises such as Britton, or Coke's Institutes — may encounter sement or its French cognate establissement without any modern gloss.
The primary research trap is anachronism: the Edwardian statutes referenced by this term (the Statutes of Westminster 1275, 1285, and 1290, Quia Emptores, De Donis Conditionalibus, and others) are well-documented under their modern names and in modern scholarship, but a researcher following a citation back to a 17th-century source like Coke's Second Institutes will find the older terminology in use. Coke's citation at 2 Inst. 156 is the bridge point between medieval usage and later common law commentary.
For the dower settlement meaning, the term connects to a body of Norman-French procedural practice that was eventually absorbed into common law dower doctrine. Britton's treatment (c. 102) is a key primary source for this usage. Researchers tracing the history of spousal property rights will find sement functioning as a term of art for a specific legal act rather than a general principle.
Because the term straddles legislative history and property law, corpus researchers should check both statutory history collections and treatises on medieval land law when tracking its use. The term is unlikely to appear in any American legal source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole source dictionary for this entry, and its treatment is brief but structurally sound. Bouvier correctly identifies the dual function of the term — public legislative instrument and private property settlement — and anchors both senses in contemporaneous primary authority (Coke and Britton). The entry implicitly signals the Norman-French origin by rendering the cognate form establissement alongside sement, which is useful for cross-referencing in French-language medieval sources.
What Bouvier does not address is the broader legislative context of the Edwardian statutes, which limits the entry's utility for researchers trying to understand why this particular reign generated its own terminology for statute-making. The volume and constitutional significance of Edward I's legislation was distinctive enough that contemporaries developed specific vocabulary to describe it — a point that neither Bouvier nor the sources he cites elaborates.
No other standard historical law dictionary in the Law Mind corpus (Black's, Stroud's, Wharton's) includes an entry for sement, which itself signals how completely the term dropped out of active legal usage.
Jurisdictional Note
Sement is a term of English medieval law with no American reception. It does not appear in colonial or early American legal sources in any operative sense. Researchers working in English legal history prior to roughly 1500 are the primary audience for this entry.