Definition
A Law French plea formula meaning "always and still ready." Toujours et uncore prist is the name of a plea of tender, used by a defendant to assert that he has always been and remains ready to pay a debt or perform an obligation. When a creditor brings suit after a valid tender has already been made and refused, the defendant pleads the prior tender and couples it with this formula — declaring continuous willingness to pay — and must then bring the tendered sum into court to support the plea. The plea, if sustained, defeats the plaintiff's claim for damages beyond the amount tendered, as the creditor's refusal of a valid tender shifts costs and consequences onto the creditor.
Common Confusion
The formula is sometimes treated loosely as synonymous with a bare plea of tender, but the two are distinct in function. A plea of tender asserts the historical fact of an offer of payment. Toujours et uncore prist adds the forward-looking element — the declaration of continuing readiness — and triggers the procedural requirement of paying the money into court. Without that accompanying payment into court, the plea is incomplete and will not be sustained. Researchers reading older pleading records should be careful not to treat the formula as mere ornamental Latin.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the world of common law pleading before procedural reform, and researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in materials predating the abolition of common law forms of action — in English practice, before the Common Law Procedure Acts of the mid-nineteenth century; in American practice, before code pleading reforms began displacing the old forms state by state in the latter half of the same century. After those reforms, the substance of tender and continuing readiness survived, but the formal Latin and Law French pleading vocabulary — including this formula — was largely discarded.
Two research traps follow from this. First, because the term appears in its full form only in older pleading records, reports, and treatises, a researcher who searches for it in modern case databases will find almost nothing. The underlying doctrine — tender, refusal, payment into court, shift of costs — must be traced through modern equivalents in procedural rules and contract law without relying on the formula. Second, the Law French construction can cause transcription and indexing errors in digitized historical sources. Variant spellings (prist/pret, uncore/encore, toujours with or without accent) appear across manuscript and early printed sources, and a search on any single spelling may miss parallel materials.
For corpus researchers using Law Mind, this term connects the pleading law shelf to materials on tender, debt actions, and the history of procedural reform. It also touches the costs and fees materials, since the central practical consequence of a successful toujours et uncore prist plea was the reallocation of litigation costs to the creditor who refused a valid tender.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st ed.) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in full agreement on the core definition: the formula means "always and still ready" and names a plea of tender. Bouvier adds the procedurally critical detail — that the defendant must pay the money into court — and explains the operative sequence: tender made, creditor refuses, creditor sues, defendant pleads the tender plus the toujours et uncore prist formula, money paid into court. This sequence is essential context that Black's abbreviated entry omits. Neither source discusses the historical decline of the formula or its displacement by code pleading, which is a significant gap for any researcher working across time periods rather than within a single era of practice.
The entry attributed to Black's 2nd edition in the source material appears to be a misattributed passage concerning constructive total loss in marine insurance — a substantively unrelated topic. That text has no apparent connection to toujours et uncore prist and should be disregarded as a scanning or compilation error. Researchers relying on digitized versions of historical dictionaries should treat such anomalies as warnings that OCR and pagination errors can corrupt entries in ways that are not always obvious from context.
Jurisdictional Note
The plea and its formula originate in English common law pleading and were carried into American practice in jurisdictions that followed common law forms. Its use was always procedural and formal; the underlying doctrine of tender survived jurisdictional transplantation far better than the Law French vocabulary did.