Definition
TAMPS is an obsolete Law French term meaning "time." It appears in early legal records and manuscripts as an archaic variant spelling of *temps*, the standard Law French word for time. The term has no independent modern legal significance and is encountered only in historical legal documents, primarily medieval English sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Third-person singular simple present indicative of the verb "to tamp" — meaning to pack down or plug a substance by repeated light blows (e.g., tamping down tobacco in a pipe or explosive material in a borehole).
The gap between common and legal usage here is total. The common English verb "tamp" and the Law French noun "tamps" are unrelated in both origin and meaning. A researcher encountering "tamps" in a historical legal document should not interpret it through the lens of modern English.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research risk is misreading. A researcher unfamiliar with Law French conventions may encounter "tamps" in a medieval plea roll, year book, or early legal treatise and fail to recognize it as a time-referencing term. Mistaking it for a modern English word — or dismissing it as a scribal error — could cause a material misunderstanding of the document's meaning.
"Tamps" belongs to a cluster of Law French temporal terms that appear in early English legal sources. Where a document records procedural timing, limitation periods, or the sequence of legal acts, "tamps" (or its standard form *temps*) may carry significant legal weight. In contexts involving time-sensitive rights, statutes of limitation predecessors, or the computation of legal terms, correctly identifying the word as meaning "time" is essential to accurate interpretation.
Researchers should also be alert to the orthographic instability of Law French. Scribal variation was common, and the same word might appear as *tamps*, *temps*, *tans*, or related forms across different manuscripts or even within a single document. Kelham's *Law French Dictionary* (cited in Burrill) is the standard reference for resolving such variants.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives a minimal entry: "L. Fr. Time. Kelham. An old form of temps." This is consistent with Kelham's treatment of Law French orthographic variants. No additional historical legal dictionaries in the current corpus expand on this entry. The brevity of the entry reflects that "tamps" was already recognized as a variant form rather than an independent term of art, even by the time the primary historical dictionaries were compiled. Researchers should not expect richer treatment in other period sources — this is a scribal variant, not a substantive legal concept.