Definition
An Anglo-Norman legal term meaning neglect, omission, default, or cessation. In old English law, sursise denoted a failure to perform a legal duty or obligation — particularly the failure to act when action was required. The cognate verb form, sursiser (also rendered surcesser), carried the corresponding meaning: to neglect or omit a required act.
The term appears most distinctly in the context of the hue and cry: a person who heard the cry and failed to join the pursuit was said to have committed a sursise, for which amends were owed to the king.
Common Confusion
Sursise should not be confused with surmise (a conjecture or supposition) or with the modern English word "surprise." The visual and phonetic proximity of these words creates misreading risk in manuscript and early printed sources. Sursise is also distinct from nonsuit and default in the technical senses those terms acquired in later common law practice, though it overlaps conceptually with both.
Why It Matters in Research
Sursise is an obsolete term of art confined almost entirely to early Anglo-Norman legal texts and their commentaries. Researchers will not encounter it in modern statutes or reported cases. Its significance is paleographic and interpretive: the term appears in Britton and in the Laws attributed to William the Conqueror (Leges Guillelmi Conquestoris), and a reader working with those texts or their translations must recognize sursise as a term of specific legal content — failure of duty — rather than a general expression of neglect.
The phrase quoted in Burrill — "De somounses, et de sursises, et de essoines" — clusters sursise with summonses and essoinss (excuses for non-appearance), signaling that early Norman procedure recognized a taxonomy of procedural failure. Understanding where sursise sits in that taxonomy matters for interpreting what consequences attached to the omission.
One research trap: Black's first and second editions present the definition of sursise in entries that appear physically adjacent to, or interleaved with, unrelated material on survey and on courts of probate. This is an artifact of alphabetical layout, not a substantive connection. Researchers consulting those editions should be alert to the surrounding text and not attribute to sursise any doctrinal relationship to survey or probate matters.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill provides the most useful treatment, supplying the French-law root (sursiser), the cognate verb form (sursiser / surcesser), and two primary source quotations that ground the term in actual medieval legal usage. The hue-and-cry passage from the Leges Guillelmi Conquestoris is particularly instructive: it shows sursise operating as a term with concrete legal consequences (a duty to make amends to the king), not merely a synonym for carelessness.
Black's first and second editions agree on the core definition — neglect, omission, default, cessation — but offer no additional context or source quotation. Their entries are functional but thin. Neither edition addresses the procedural taxonomy in which sursise operated or its relationship to contemporary doctrines of essoins and summonses.
No modern legal dictionary in the standard corpus develops the term further. For substantive treatment, researchers must go to Britton directly or to secondary scholarship on Anglo-Norman legal procedure.
Jurisdictional Note
Sursise is a term of English legal history with no counterpart in American law. It does not appear in any American statutory or case law tradition. Researchers encountering the term are working in the domain of early English legal history, not any jurisdiction's operative law.