Definition
A Law French adverbial particle meaning "so" or "as," used in medieval English legal texts to introduce comparisons, oath formulas, and descriptive qualifications. The term functions grammatically rather than substantively — it does not name a legal concept but instead connects elements of a phrase, much as "as" or "just as" operates in modern English. Its appearances in historical legal documents are almost always embedded within larger formulas or expressions rather than standing as an independent term of art.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering SICOME in primary sources — particularly medieval plea rolls, writs, treatises, or oath transcriptions — should treat it as a grammatical connector rather than a legal term requiring independent definition. Misreading it as a substantive term of art would distort the meaning of the surrounding passage.
The two canonical appearances recorded by Burrill illustrate the range of its use. In property contexts, the phrase *sicome son several* (as his several, or as his severalty) modifies a possessive or descriptive claim about land held separately. In oath contexts, *sicome moy ayde Dieu* (so help me God) is the sworn invocation that closes a formal oath — a formula with procedural significance even if the particle itself carries no independent legal weight. Researchers working on the history of the oath, on property held in severalty, or on Littleton's *Tenures* may encounter SICOME in exactly these roles.
Because Law French orthography was unstandardized, variant spellings are common in manuscript sources. SICOME may appear as *si come*, *si-come*, *sicōme*, or collapsed into surrounding text without clear word boundaries. Searching for the term in digitized historical corpora requires flexibility in spelling and an awareness that OCR transcription of Law French is frequently unreliable.
The term belongs to a class of Law French function words — including *pur*, *come*, *issint*, and *sur* — that appear constantly in medieval legal writing but receive little treatment in modern legal dictionaries precisely because they are grammatical rather than conceptual. Their importance to researchers lies not in definition but in accurate translation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only treatment of SICOME in the standard shelf sources, and it is appropriately brief: "So; as." Burrill anchors the definition with two illustrative phrases drawn from Britton and from Littleton's *Tenures* (sect. 514), both of which are genuine primary texts. Britton's *c. 59* reference places SICOME in an early discussion of several possession; Littleton's *sect. 514* places it in the sworn oath formula. No other standard historical legal dictionary — not Bouvier, not Black's, not Tomlin's — appears to carry a separate entry for SICOME, reflecting a consistent judgment across the tradition that the term requires translation rather than legal explication.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any guidance on orthographic variation or on the translation challenges posed by Law French in manuscript versus print sources — a gap that modern researchers working with digitized archives will feel acutely.