Definition
An archaic Law French verb meaning "to be worth" or "to be of value." The term appears in medieval legal texts to describe the monetary worth or assessed value of a thing, typically personal property or goods at issue in a legal proceeding. It is not a term of art in modern law and survives only in historical legal sources as a relic of the Law French vocabulary that permeated early English common law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal texts, particularly those composed in or drawing from Law French sources. Its primary relevance is interpretive: when reading early plea rolls, year books, or treatises such as Britton, a researcher must recognize that vailler functions as a verb of valuation, not a noun or term of legal classification. Misreading it as a proper name or unfamiliar noun is a practical trap in manuscript and transcribed sources.
The phrase most commonly associated with the term — *ne vaille mye doze deners* ("is not worth twelve pence") — appears in contexts where the value of a disputed item determined jurisdictional thresholds or the availability of certain forms of action. Medieval English courts frequently calibrated procedures, remedies, and even the right to bring suit against minimum value thresholds. Recognizing vailler as the operative verb in such phrases is essential to understanding the legal significance of the surrounding passage.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should treat vailler as a linguistic key, not a substantive legal doctrine. Its presence signals a valuation determination, which may in turn connect to questions of jurisdiction, pleading sufficiency, or the measure of damages in the source document under examination.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary anglophone source cataloguing this term, and its entry is brief but precise: it identifies vailler as Law French for "to be worth" or "to be of value," and illustrates usage with a phrase drawn from Britton (c. 15) — *et la chose ne vaille mye doze deners*, meaning "and the thing is not worth twelve pence." Britton, the late-thirteenth-century English legal treatise composed in Law French and attributed in tradition to John le Breton, is the natural habitat for this vocabulary.
No significant divergence exists among historical sources on the meaning of vailler; the term is sufficiently narrow and archaic that disagreement is unlikely. What historical dictionaries generally omit is the procedural context: the twelve-pence threshold and similar value floors were not incidental. They carried real legal consequence in determining whether a matter fell within the cognizance of a particular court or merited a particular form of proceeding. Burrill records the term faithfully but does not develop this procedural dimension, which is the more practically significant layer for legal historians.