Definition
An archaic Law French spelling variant of "serjeant," used in early English legal texts. The term appears in medieval legal records and treatises to denote a serjeant — most commonly a serjeant-at-law, a member of the highest order of barristers at the English common law bar, but also applicable to serjeants in other official capacities such as the serjeant-at-arms or the king's serjeant. As a spelling form, SERIAUNT belongs to the transitional period of Anglo-Norman legal French and carries no distinct legal meaning separate from SERJEANT; the two are interchangeable in historical sources.
Common Confusion
SERIAUNT, SERJEANT, SERGEANT, and SERVAUNT are easily conflated in archival research. SERIAUNT and SERJEANT are the same office rendered in different orthographic conventions. SERGEANT is the modern English adaptation and carries broader meanings across military, police, and municipal contexts that the historical legal form did not always share. SERVAUNT (servant) is a distinct term entirely; the visual similarity of the two in manuscript hands has produced transcription errors in secondary sources. Researchers reading original folios should confirm context before assuming which office is intended.
Why It Matters in Research
SERIAUNT is a spelling variant found in Britton and similar early Anglo-Norman legal texts, and researchers will encounter it only when working directly with those sources or with treatises that quote them closely. Burrill cites multiple folios of Britton (fol. 25, 34b, 37, 39b, 40, 40b, 50, 52, 70, 103b, 104b, 123b, 204, 275b), indicating the form appears with some frequency throughout that text rather than as an isolated usage. A researcher encountering SERIAUNT in a transcription of Britton or a related medieval source should treat it as fully equivalent to SERJEANT and follow the research trail for that term — its history, rank, and institutional role — rather than searching for a distinct office called SERIAUNT.
The practical trap here is orthographic: medieval and early modern legal French was not standardized, and scribes rendered the same term differently across manuscripts, jurisdictions, and decades. Variant spellings include SERJEANT, SERIANT, SERIAUNT, SERJANT, and SERGEAUNT, among others. Full-text corpus searches limited to a single spelling will miss relevant material. Researchers should run searches across known variants when working with digitized manuscript collections or early print editions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats SERIAUNT as a simple cross-reference to SERJEANT, noting only its Law French origin and its appearance in Britton. This is the appropriate treatment: the entry carries no independent doctrinal weight and exists solely to capture the variant spelling for researchers who encounter it in a primary source. Burrill does not attempt a substantive definition at this entry, correctly directing the reader to the main SERJEANT entry for the substance of the office.
The historical dictionaries as a class handle spelling variants of this kind unevenly. Some, like Burrill, flag them as distinct entries; others fold them silently under the modern form. This inconsistency means that a researcher who finds SERIAUNT in an index or concordance but not in a given dictionary should not conclude the term is obscure — it may simply be subsumed under SERJEANT without a cross-reference.
Jurisdictional Note
SERIAUNT as a term is exclusively English in origin and application. It does not appear in Scots, Irish, or colonial American legal sources as a functional term; where the office of serjeant-at-law existed in colonial contexts, later spellings and forms predominate.