Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning holy things, specifically the Gospels. Used in early Norman and Anglo-Norman legal procedure to denote the sacred text upon which an oath was administered. The phrase *jura sur sentez* — let him swear upon the Gospels — describes the act of oath-taking in the formal juridical sense, where the swearer placed his hand upon or otherwise invoked the Gospels as the sanctifying instrument of the oath. The term derives from the Latin *sancta* (holy or sacred things) and passed into legal usage through the Norman French legal vocabulary that shaped early English common law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recorded in modern English usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded. The term belongs to the specialized vocabulary of Law French rather than to general English at any period.
The term has no meaningful life outside legal and liturgical contexts. Its closest ordinary counterpart would be a general reference to holy scripture or sacred objects, but the legal usage carries a precise procedural meaning — the Gospels as the instrument of oath administration — that no common English word replicates.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal records, Norman law, or the history of oath procedure will encounter *sentez* almost exclusively in formulaic phrases, particularly *jura sur sentez*. The significance is procedural: the precise object on which an oath was sworn carried legal weight in medieval practice. Swearing on the Gospels was the standard solemn form; deviations — swearing on relics, on saints, or on lesser objects — could affect the legal force of the oath or signal a party's religious status.
The term appears almost nowhere in post-medieval legal writing. By the time Law French was codified into legal dictionaries and abridgments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, *sentez* had already become antiquarian. Researchers using Burrill's or other nineteenth-century law dictionaries as guides to Anglo-Norman sources should treat entries like this one as pointers toward primary record sources — plea rolls, custumals, and early charters — rather than as living legal vocabulary.
Cross-corpus traps: the Latin equivalent *sancta* appears in ecclesiastical law contexts with a broader range of meanings (holy things generally, including church property and sacraments). Do not assume that a passage invoking *sancta* in a Latin ecclesiastical document is using the term in the narrow oath-procedure sense that *sentez* carries in Norman legal usage.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source with a discrete entry for this term, and its treatment is brief but precise. Burrill correctly glosses *sentez* as deriving from Latin *sancta*, identifies it as the Gospels specifically (rather than sacred objects generally), and anchors the definition in the *Leges Wilhelmi Conquestoris* — the compilations attributed to William the Conqueror, though scholars have long debated their actual date and authenticity.
No entry for *sentez* appears in Bouvier, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or the later American legal dictionaries, which reflects the term's effectively dead status in legal practice by the nineteenth century. Jacob's Law Dictionary and Cowell's *Interpreter* address oath procedure in Norman law but do not isolate *sentez* as a headword, treating oath-taking vocabulary under broader entries such as *serment* or *oath*.
The reliance on the *Leges Wilhelmi* in Burrill deserves a cautionary note for researchers: these compilations are now understood to be composite texts assembled after the Conquest, not a unified royal legislation, and their evidentiary value for dating specific legal usages is limited.