Definition
A Law French term meaning "all," understood as a corruption of *touts*. Appears in early legal formularies and pleadings, most commonly in phrases such as *tuz ceuz* ("all those") and *encontre tuz iceaus* ("against all those"). Functioned as a particle of universal reference in medieval legal instruments, particularly in contexts establishing that a grant, obligation, or protection ran against all persons generally.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current English entry. The word is not in active use in any general sense.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A lock or tuft of hair." Marked as obsolete. Attributed to Dryden.
The two meanings share no connection whatsoever. The archaic English *tuz* meaning a tuft of hair is an entirely separate word from the Law French *tuz* meaning "all." A researcher encountering *tuz* in a historical legal document should not associate it with the English usage recorded by Webster; the legal term is a French-derived particle of legal drafting, not a descriptor of physical objects.
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Why It Matters in Research
*Tuz* appears almost exclusively in transcriptions or printed editions of medieval English legal records — particularly those predating the gradual displacement of Law French from pleading and instrument drafting (a process completed formally in England by statute in the mid-seventeenth century, though Law French lingered in legal education and formularies longer). The term has essentially no independent legal force; it exists as part of fixed formulaic phrases rather than as a freestanding operative word.
Researchers working in early Year Books, cartularies, or plea rolls transcribed into Law French will encounter *tuz* as a structural particle rather than a term of art. The danger is misreading it as a proper noun, a name, or an abbreviation. Context will almost always resolve the ambiguity: when followed by *ceuz* or a pronoun of similar class, the phrase means "all those" and typically introduces a universal obligation or grant clause.
Because *tuz* is a phonological corruption of *touts*, researchers consulting different manuscript traditions or printed editions of the same document may encounter both spellings for the same word. Kelham's glossary (cited by Burrill) is one of the few readily accessible historical references that identifies the corruption explicitly, making Burrill's entry here unusually useful as a cross-check.
Researchers should also note that Law French orthography was notoriously inconsistent across scribes and time periods. Variant spellings such as *touz*, *toux*, or *tutz* may appear in related documents. None of these variants affects legal meaning; they are scribal or dialectal alternatives.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive entry among the historical shelf sources. Burrill identifies *tuz* as Law French, glosses it as "all," marks it as a corruption of *touts*, and supplies two illustrative phrases with translations: *tuz ceuz* ("all those") and *encontre tuz iceaus* ("against all those"), citing Kelham for the first and *Articuli super Cartas* for the second. The entry is brief but precise.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus carry a dedicated entry for *tuz*. Its absence from sources such as Tomlin or Bouvier reflects both the term's purely functional role in Law French drafting and the general thinning of Law French coverage in dictionaries compiled after the seventeenth century. Burrill, writing in the mid-nineteenth century with a broader historical reach than many contemporaries, preserved this and similar obsolete Law French particles where others did not.
The reference to *Articuli super Cartas* (1300) is significant. That document — a significant clarification and extension of Magna Carta obligations — employed standard Law French formulary language, and its text is a known source for the kind of universal-obligation clauses (*encontre tuz iceaus*) that *tuz* appears in. Researchers consulting that instrument in original or edited form will find the term in its natural habitat.
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Jurisdictional Note
As a Law French particle with no operative legal meaning independent of the formulaic phrases it appeared in, *tuz* has no jurisdictional variation in the modern sense. Its relevance is entirely historical and confined to English legal records and instruments drafted during the period of Law French legal usage.
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