Definition
VAIL has two distinct legal senses in historical English law, neither of which survives in active modern usage. Researchers will encounter both in historical sources and must distinguish them carefully.
1. Gratuities or perquisites received by servants and subordinate officers. In this sense, vails (almost always plural) referred to customary payments or gifts received by servants, court officers, or other subordinates — not as salary, but as incidental benefits flowing from their position. A doorkeeper who received tips from litigants, or a sheriff's officer who received small payments from those he served, collected vails. The term described this class of emolument as a recognized, if informal, form of compensation.
2. (Archaic) A lowering or submission; to yield or submit. In older legal and ceremonial contexts, to vail meant to lower something — a flag, a sail, a weapon — as an act of deference or acknowledgment of authority. This sense appears in phrases about submission to jurisdiction or acknowledgment of a superior's power.
The first meaning is the legally significant one and the focus of most historical legal dictionary treatment.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To lower or allow to sink; specifically, to dip a flag or banner as a salute, or to remove something as a sign of deference.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Treated as a variant of "veil."
The common meaning — a physical lowering or act of deference — is not entirely unrelated to the legal meaning, but the legal use is narrower and more specific: it refers to customary monetary gratuities received by those in positions of service or minor official trust. A researcher encountering "vails" in a legal document should not read it as a metaphor for submission but as a reference to informal perquisite income.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
VAILS (plural): The standard form in legal usage. References to a single "vail" are uncommon; the term typically appears in the plural when describing the class of gratuities received by servants or officers.
VAILANCE / VAILLAUNCE: A related Anglo-French form meaning value or worth, appearing in older records and distinct from vails as gratuities. Burrill records this form explicitly. Researchers working in early Year Book materials or Britton should note that vailance pertains to monetary value of property or damages, not to gratuities or deference.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap with VAIL is conflation across its forms. Burrill's entry groups together several related but distinct terms — vail, vailance, valentia, and the maxim valeat quantum valere potest — in a way that can obscure which concept is operative in a given source. A researcher tracing compensation structures for historical court officers needs to distinguish vails (informal gratuities) from salary, from fees of office, and from the separate concept of honorarium.
The connection to attorney fee doctrine is indirect but worth flagging. Anderson's entry on attorney fees notes that at common law fees were treated as honoraria — gratuities expressive of gratitude — not enforceable debts. Vails occupied a similar conceptual space for non-attorney servants and officers: customary, expected, but not always legally enforceable as of right. This parallel creates a research connection between vails literature and the broader history of fee recovery.
Temporal scope matters significantly here. Vails as a recognized category of servant or officer income were a live issue in English law through the eighteenth century. Reform movements, particularly those targeting corruption in public offices, treated vails as a target for elimination. By the nineteenth century, the term was largely archaic in English legal writing and does not appear in standard American legal usage. Sources after roughly 1850 that use the term are either historical, quoting earlier law, or using it in the ceremonial/deference sense.
Researchers in the Law Mind corpus who encounter "vails" in materials concerning offices of trust, sheriffs, court officers, or domestic service disputes should read them as compensation-related rather than as references to submission or property valuation — unless the surrounding text clearly signals one of the variant meanings.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries approach VAIL from different angles, and their divergence is itself informative.
Burrill engages most directly with the term's linguistic and conceptual range. His entry groups vail with Franco-Latin relatives — valentia, vaillaunce — and cross-references paravail and the maxim valeat quantum valere potest. This encyclopedic clustering reflects Burrill's method but risks suggesting that these terms are more tightly connected in legal doctrine than they are. Vailance (value) and vails (gratuities) are etymologically related but functionally distinct.
Anderson's entry does not define vail directly but provides essential context through his treatment of attorney honoraria — the broader doctrinal category into which vails fit conceptually. His observation that fee recovery was rooted in Roman patron-client relations helps explain why vails occupied an ambiguous legal status: they were expected but not always compellable.
Rapalje & Lawrence do not provide a direct entry on vail in the retrieved material, their excerpt addressing instead the tenant to the praecipe problem. This absence is itself instructive: by the late nineteenth century, when Rapalje & Lawrence were writing for an American audience, vails had dropped out of active legal discourse sufficiently that a major American law dictionary could omit it without obvious loss.
None of the three dictionaries provides a clean doctrinal definition of vails as a category of compensable interest. Researchers needing to trace enforcement or regulation of vails in English law should look beyond these sources to treatises on office and officers and to parliamentary reform literature.
Jurisdictional Note
VAIL in the gratuities sense is substantially an English common law concept with no significant American legal development. American law addressed analogous issues through corruption statutes, regulation of public officers, and employment law rather than through the vails framework. Researchers working in American sources after independence should not expect to find the term in operative legal documents.