Definition
A Law French verb meaning to vex, harass, trouble, or disturb; also, to prosecute. The term appears in early English legal records and pleadings to describe the act of subjecting another to legal harassment or distressing prosecution. It carries both a general sense of causing trouble or torment and a more specific procedural sense of bringing or pressing a legal action against a person — particularly where the prosecution itself is characterized as oppressive or burdensome.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In modern French, "travailler" means simply to work or to labor. No legal connotation survives in contemporary French usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not list "travailler" as an English entry, reflecting its status as a borrowed Law French term rather than a naturalized English word. The related English word "travail" — meaning painful labor, suffering, or toil — preserves something of the older sense of hardship.
The gap here is historically significant. While modern French has narrowed the word entirely to the sense of productive labor, the older Anglo-Norman sense carried a meaning of affliction, torment, and oppression. In legal usage, this older and harsher sense was controlling. A researcher encountering "travailler" in a legal source should not interpret it through the lens of modern French.
Common Confusion
The word's modern French meaning (to work) and its surviving English cognate "travail" (laborious effort or suffering) can both mislead readers of historical legal documents. "Travail" in ordinary English suggests hardship but not necessarily legal action; "travailler" in Law French could describe the act of prosecuting someone in a manner that was itself the harm. Researchers should also note that terms like "vexatious prosecution" and related concepts in later common law vocabulary carry forward the substantive meaning of travailler without using the word itself.
Why It Matters in Research
Travailler belongs to the stratum of Law French vocabulary that pervades early English legal records — Year Books, plea rolls, and formularies produced before and during the gradual displacement of Law French by English in legal proceedings. Researchers working in pre-seventeenth-century sources will encounter this term in contexts where the modern English equivalent would be something like "to harass by legal process" or "to prosecute oppressively."
The term is particularly relevant when tracing the historical roots of what later common law would call vexatious litigation or malicious prosecution. The conceptual content of travailler — that prosecution itself can be a form of injury to the defendant — is the ancestor of those modern doctrines. Researchers working on the history of abuse of process, maintenance, champerty, or the tort of malicious prosecution should treat travailler as a primary-source marker for that conceptual lineage.
Burrill's entry cross-references Kelham's dictionary of Norman and Old French, which is the standard reference for Law French legal vocabulary and the appropriate next stop for researchers needing fuller philological treatment. Note that Burrill's entry as preserved here contains an apparent truncation — a passage is begun concerning transportation as a criminal punishment, which appears to be either a printer's error or a misattributed entry fragment in the source. Researchers should not treat that passage as part of the substantive definition of travailler. It likely represents a scanning or typesetting artifact from the original dictionary volume.
Because travailler is a verb rather than a noun or doctrine, it will not appear as a headword in case law digests or statutory indices. It surfaces in quoted pleadings, in translation notes attached to Year Book entries, and in treatise glossaries. Researchers unfamiliar with Law French may overlook it or misread it entirely.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the principal English-language law dictionary source for this term. His definition — drawing on Kelham — captures both the general sense (to vex, harass, trouble) and the specific legal sense (to prosecute). The entry is brief, which is typical for Law French vocabulary in nineteenth-century American law dictionaries; these dictionaries were designed to assist practitioners who encountered archaic terms in old precedents rather than to provide deep philological analysis.
No substantive definition of travailler appears in later American legal dictionaries, reflecting the term's obsolescence as living legal vocabulary by the time of those compilations. Its absence from Black's Law Dictionary and similar modern references confirms that the term is of purely historical and interpretive significance. Researchers relying solely on modern dictionaries will find no entry and should treat that silence as a flag to consult specialized Law French glossaries — Kelham, Tomlins, or Termes de la Ley — rather than as evidence that the term is insignificant.
Jurisdictional Note
Travailler is a term of English legal history specifically, reflecting the Anglo-Norman legal culture of medieval and early modern England. It has no operative meaning in any current jurisdiction. Researchers in Scottish, Irish, or continental legal history should use jurisdiction-specific Law French and Latin glossaries, as vocabulary and usage varied across legal traditions.