Definition
Vaille is an archaic Law French term carrying two distinct senses in historical legal usage:
1. Sufficient; adequate. Used to characterize the legal adequacy of a thing, particularly in the context of pleading and indictment.
2. Vigil; watch. A secondary meaning denoting a period of watchfulness or keeping vigil, drawn from the same root.
In its most practically significant legal application, vaille and its Latin cognate valentiam (ad valentiam, meaning "to the value") governed how value had to be alleged in criminal indictments, particularly for offenses involving the taking of property. The rule was technical: for certain living things — young doves taken from a dovecote, young hawks taken from a wood — the indictment was required to allege either pretii (of the price) or ad valentiam (to the value). For dead things, ad valentiam alone was the proper form; pretii was not permissible. This distinction was not merely stylistic. An indictment that used the wrong form of valuation allegation was vulnerable to challenge, and the rule reflects the broader common law insistence on formal precision in criminal pleading.
The related Latin form valentia appears in Fleta, the thirteenth-century English legal treatise, confirming the term's deep roots in the medieval common law.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Vaille is an entry-level trap for researchers working in early English criminal law, particularly indictment practice and pleading records predating standardized English-language forms. The term itself will rarely appear in modern secondary sources, but its cognates — ad valentiam, valentia, pretii — surface regularly in transcriptions of medieval and early modern indictments, plea rolls, and the symboelographic literature (works on legal drafting forms).
Researchers consulting West's Symboleography or Cowell's Interpreter will encounter the valuation rule directly. Fleta is the primary doctrinal source for the Latin form valentia. The rule about living versus dead things in indictments is part of a broader cluster of archaic pleading requirements that disappeared gradually through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as indictment forms were liberalized; by the time American jurisdictions codified criminal procedure, the distinction had no operative force.
The "vigil" meaning of vaille is vestigial in legal sources and unlikely to appear in a context requiring research attention. If encountered, it signals a non-property, non-pleading context and should be read accordingly.
Corpus researchers should note that Burrill cites Kelham's Glossary of Norman and Old French Words for both senses, making Kelham a useful parallel source when Burrill's entry is insufficient.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is the primary surviving legal dictionary treatment. It is compact but accurate in capturing both the "sufficient" and "vigil" senses, and its citation to West's Symboleography (Part 2, Title Indictment, Section 70) gives the pleading rule a concrete doctrinal anchor. Burrill also flags Fleta's use of valentia, which is important: Fleta (c. 1290) represents one of the earliest systematic treatments of English criminal procedure, and its usage confirms that the valuation allegation rule was not a late invention but embedded in medieval practice.
Cowell's Interpreter (various editions, seventeenth century) is cited by Burrill without elaboration. Cowell's treatment of related terms in the valentia cluster generally corroborates the pleading rule, though Cowell's focus is more definitional than procedural.
No other major historical legal dictionaries — not Jacob, not Tomlin, not Bouvier — appear to have carried a dedicated entry for vaille itself, suggesting the term was recognized as sufficiently obscure even by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that lexicographers subsumed it under Latin cognates or omitted it. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as essentially the terminus of the English-language legal dictionary tradition for this term and work outward from the cited primary sources.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The valuation allegation rule associated with vaille and ad valentiam was an English common law pleading requirement. It did not transplant into American criminal procedure in any operative form, though early American treatises on indictment practice occasionally referenced the historical rule as background. No significant jurisdictional variation exists in modern law because the rule is obsolete across all common law jurisdictions.
---