Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "to be at leisure" or "to be unoccupied." In its legal context, vacquer referred to a period during which a court, office, or legal proceeding was idle or in recess — a time of vacancy or intermission in the ordinary course of legal business. The term appears most naturally in connection with the vacations of courts, signifying the intervals between legal terms when judicial proceedings were suspended.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering vacquer in historical legal texts should read it as a marker of procedural timing and court scheduling, not as a term with substantive legal consequence in its own right. Its primary value is contextual: when a source notes that a court or officer is vacquant, it signals that ordinary legal process was suspended and that deadlines, filings, and proceedings were affected accordingly.
The term belongs to the Law French stratum of English legal vocabulary — a layer that persisted in formal legal writing well into the eighteenth century but had largely disappeared from practical use by the nineteenth. Researchers working in Year Books, early English equity records, or pre-modern pleading manuals are most likely to encounter it. In those sources, it will typically appear in discussions of term-time versus vacation, or in arguments about whether a particular act or service could be performed during a period of court recess.
Because Burrill himself supplies only the gloss from Kelham's dictionary of Law French terms, researchers should treat vacquer as a vocabulary item rather than a defined legal doctrine. Its significance is philological — it unlocks meaning in a primary source rather than carrying its own body of case law or statutory interpretation. If the primary source in question discusses what may or may not be done during a period of vacquer, the relevant doctrine to pursue is the law of court vacations, term-days, and the rules governing acts performed outside of term.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal: citing Kelham, he records the meaning as simply "to be at leisure." This brevity is telling. Burrill treats vacquer as a vocabulary gloss rather than a substantive legal concept, which accurately reflects its standing in the tradition. It is a functional word of legal French — useful for describing a state of affairs — rather than a term of art carrying precise legal consequences in its own right.
Kelham's dictionary of Law French terms, from which Burrill draws, is the natural primary authority here. Researchers who need to trace vacquer further should consult Kelham directly, as well as the broader Law French glossaries associated with early English legal scholarship. No substantive divergence between available sources exists for this term because so few sources address it at all. Its absence from most later legal dictionaries confirms that it passed out of active use without generating interpretive controversy or doctrinal elaboration.
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