Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "served." Appearing in the context of process returns, *servy* (or *returne servy*) denotes that a writ, summons, or other legal process has been served upon the party to whom it was directed. The phrase *returne servy* — "returned served" — was the formal notation made by a sheriff or other officer on the back of a writ to indicate that service had been accomplished.
Common Language
The term has no meaningful presence in modern common English and is not found in Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 as a standalone entry. It is a remnant of Law French vocabulary and carries no ordinary English meaning independent of its legal procedural context.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *servy* or *returne servy* will find the term almost exclusively in early English common law sources — Year Books, plea rolls, and the older English reporters — where Law French remained the language of pleading and court record. By the time American legal practice was formalized, the term had been displaced entirely by its English equivalents: "served," "returned served," or simply "return of service."
The practical trap is one of vocabulary recognition. A researcher working through sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English reports in Law French editions (as Burrill's citation to Dyer 135b in the French edition illustrates) may encounter *servy* without context sufficient to identify it as a technical term of service of process. Misreading it as a proper name or an unrelated French word would cause the researcher to miss the procedural posture of the case entirely.
Corpus researchers should note that *servy* is a marker for a specific moment in a case's procedural history: the point at which the court's process reached the defendant. Its presence in a record signals that personal jurisdiction was being established, or that a default or subsequent step in litigation was predicated on completed service. In cases where service was contested, the *returne servy* notation on the writ face would have been the central documentary evidence.
There is no American statutory or common law usage of this term. It does not appear in modern procedural codes, rules, or digests. Its value is purely historical and philological.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term. The entry is spare: "*L. Fr. Served. Returne servy; returned served. Dyer, 135 b, (Fr. edition.)*" This is consistent with Burrill's general treatment of Law French survivals — brief definitional acknowledgment, anchored to a primary source citation. The citation to Dyer (Sir James Dyer's reports, covering cases from the mid-sixteenth century) confirms that the term was in active procedural use during the Tudor period and reflects the Law French still employed in English courts at that time.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus addresses this term. Its absence from later dictionaries — including those of the nineteenth century — reflects the complete obsolescence of Law French in legal practice well before those compilations were undertaken. The term is too archaic and too narrow to appear in works oriented toward practicing lawyers of the modern era.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is English in origin and has no American jurisdictional application. Researchers confined to American legal sources will not encounter it outside of historical treatments of English practice or works on Law French.