Definition
In old English legal practice, an advocate or professional pleader, specifically a term applied to serjeants at law. The term was used in early legal texts to describe those who spoke on behalf of parties in court proceedings and is synonymous with the older term narrator. The role corresponded to what later developed into the formal office of serjeant at law, the highest rank of barrister at common law before its abolition in the nineteenth century.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Ellipsis of Tour de France (the cycling race); more broadly, a journey made for pleasure, business, or inspection, typically returning to the starting point.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A tower. Marked as obsolete, citing Chaucer.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is total. The legal term tour is not a journey or a tower but a person — a professional advocate. A researcher encountering the word in medieval or early common law records must not assume the ordinary English sense; the word functions as a term of art for a class of legal practitioner, not a description of travel or structure.
Common Confusion
Tour and narrator are treated as synonyms in Bouvier, but the two terms carry different linguistic roots and appear with different frequency across historical sources. Narrator was the more consistently used Latin-derived term in formal legal writing; tour appears more often in vernacular or transitional texts of the medieval period. Serjeant counter (or countor) is the third synonymous label, derived from the French conter, to count or recount — referencing the oral recitation of a client's case. Researchers should not treat these as denoting distinct roles; all three describe the same class of advocate.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources — year books, early plea rolls, and antiquarian legal histories — and not in modern practice materials. Because the word tour in its legal sense fell out of use well before systematic legal reporting, researchers consulting Law Mind sources on pleading, advocacy, or the serjeant at law will find it only in the oldest layers of the corpus. The term is a navigational marker: its presence in a text signals engagement with pre-modern English pleading practice.
The convergence of three synonyms — tour, narrator, countor — across sources that do not always cross-reference one another creates an indexing problem. A search for one term will not retrieve records using the others. Researchers tracing the history of the advocate's role or the pleading function at common law should run searches under all three labels, as well as under serjeant at law, to avoid gaps.
The term has no meaningful life in American law. It does not appear in colonial or early American legal materials as a term of art, because the serjeant at law as an institution was not transplanted to the colonies in the same form.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier is the sole source here, and his entry is brief: he identifies tour as synonymous with narrator and serjeant countor, and attributes the authority to Burrill's Law Dictionary. This chain of attribution — Bouvier citing Burrill — is typical for archaic terms that both dictionaries inherited from English legal antiquarianism rather than from living practice. Neither dictionary treats tour as a term in contemporary use; both treat it as historical record.
Webster's 1913 definition (a tower, obsolete) is unhelpful for legal research purposes and represents a completely separate etymological strand. The legal term tour appears to derive from French legal vocabulary of the Norman and Angevin periods, not from the Old English or Old French word for tower. Historical dictionaries do not bridge this gap, and researchers should not rely on general English dictionaries to illuminate the legal term.
Jurisdictional Note
Tour in this legal sense is exclusively a term of English law, reflecting the medieval and early modern common law tradition. It has no recognized equivalent or usage in Scottish, Irish, or American legal systems as a distinct term of art.