Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "let it be delivered to the lords." It was the formula inscribed as an endorsement on a bill in the English Parliament when the bill was transmitted from the House of Commons to the House of Lords for consideration. The phrase functioned as a formal procedural notation rather than a substantive legal term — it marked the completion of one legislative stage and the commencement of another.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively encountered in historical sources dealing with English parliamentary procedure and will appear in records, treatises, and legal reports from the medieval and early modern periods. Researchers working with parliamentary rolls, bills, or reports touching on the legislative process of the English Parliament should recognize it as a procedural endorsement formula rather than a term carrying substantive legal meaning.
The phrase belongs to the body of Law French procedural vocabulary that saturated English legal records from roughly the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. Because Law French terms of this kind were largely confined to formal written procedure, they rarely appear in case law as contested terms — their meaning was fixed by usage and not subject to judicial interpretation. Researchers should therefore look for the phrase in primary parliamentary sources, such as the Rolls of Parliament, rather than in case reporters.
The single authority cited across both historical dictionaries — Hobart 111a — places the phrase in the context of seventeenth-century common law reporting. Sir Henry Hobart's reports (published posthumously, covering cases from the early seventeenth century) are part of the Law Mind corpus and provide the earliest traceable printed reference for this formula in dictionary sources. Researchers consulting that reporter should note that the reference is illustrative rather than definitional; Hobart was citing parliamentary practice, not adjudicating the meaning of the phrase.
No jurisdictional carryover to American law exists. The phrase is a relic of bicameral English parliamentary procedure and has no operative counterpart in United States federal or state legislative practice, where transmission of bills between chambers is governed by constitutional text, statute, and internal rules rather than Law French endorsement formulas.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term: both supply an identical translation ("let it be delivered to the lords"), an identical functional description (the endorsement form for bills sent to the House of Lords), and an identical citation (Hobart 111a). Neither dictionary elaborates beyond this core definition, and neither attempts to trace the phrase's origins in Norman or Anglo-Norman French or to situate it within the broader development of English parliamentary procedure.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural context in any depth — specifically, the relationship of this endorsement to the complementary formula used for bills moving in the opposite direction, or to the royal assent formulas (such as "Le Roy le veult") that concluded the legislative process. Researchers interested in the full vocabulary of English parliamentary Law French will find this entry a starting point only, and should pursue specialized works on parliamentary history for a complete picture.
Burrill's entry is notable for its immediate transition to an entirely unrelated term (Sok/Soke), which reflects the alphabetical compression common in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries and carries no substantive connection to Soit baile aux seigneurs.