Definition
An archaic legal spelling of "value" or "worth," used in early English statutes and legal instruments to express the monetary worth or assessed value of property, income, or goods. In medieval and early modern English law, valour appeared regularly in statutes to denote the annual value of land, the worth of chattels, or the minimum threshold of property required to establish legal standing or qualification. The term carried no moral or military meaning in these legal contexts — it functioned as a precise economic measure, not a character description.
The spelling reflects Old and Middle English orthographic conventions, and the word passed out of ordinary legal use as "value" became the standard form during the early modern period.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Strength of mind in regard to danger; the quality enabling a person to encounter danger with firmness. Also: individually sustained verve or passion; a brave man.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Valor — Strength of mind in view of danger; that quality which enables a man to encounter danger with firmness; personal bravery; courage; prowess; intrepidity.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is total and historically important. In every legal context where the word appears — statutes, writs, conveyances — valour means monetary worth, not bravery. A researcher encountering "to the valoure of fourty shelynges" in a historical source should read it as a property qualification, not an assessment of character. The two senses share etymology but diverged entirely in specialized legal usage.
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Why It Matters in Research
VALOUR is a trap word for researchers working in medieval and early Tudor legal sources. The dominant modern meaning — courage, bravery — is entirely irrelevant to its legal function. When reading statutes from the reign of Henry V, Henry VI, or nearby periods, researchers must consistently translate valour as value or worth to understand the operative legal rule.
The term most commonly appears in two legal contexts: (1) property qualification statutes, where it sets minimum landholding or income thresholds for jury service, office-holding, or the exercise of certain rights; and (2) conveyancing and pleading language, where it describes the worth of the subject matter in dispute or transfer. Both uses require quantitative interpretation, not qualitative.
Researchers using Burrill should note that his entry, while sparse, correctly anchors the term to its statutory context with direct quotation from two Henrician statutes. The citations are reliable navigational anchors for anyone working in the parliamentary record of that era. Cross-referencing against the original statute rolls or Statutes of the Realm will confirm the usage pattern.
Because this spelling largely disappeared after the sixteenth century, it presents no meaningful variation across later common law jurisdictions. The concept it expressed — annual value of land, ratable value, minimum worth — carried forward under the modern spelling "value" and through related doctrines of valuation in property and tax law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but pointed. He does not define the term abstractly; instead, he anchors it directly to statute with two quotations from Acts of Parliament under Henry VI. "Of smal substaunce, and of no valour" (8 Hen. VI, c. 7) illustrates the use of valour as a negative descriptor of legal insufficiency — the subject lacks meaningful worth. "To the valoure of fourty shelynges by yere" (10 Hen. VI, c. 2) shows the term functioning as a quantitative threshold in a property qualification context, almost certainly for jury or electoral purposes consistent with other statutes of the period.
Burrill offers no extended analysis, treating valour as self-evident from context. This is characteristic of how older law dictionaries handled archaic spelling variants — acknowledging their existence for reference without elaborating on doctrine, because the doctrine itself was carried by the concept of value, not the spelling. Researchers should not expect later dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's) to carry this term; by those periods the spelling had fully standardized.
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Jurisdictional Note
VALOUR as a legal spelling is specific to English sources predating the standardization of legal orthography, roughly pre-seventeenth century. It does not appear as a distinct legal term in American law. Researchers working in early colonial sources may occasionally encounter it in instruments or statutory references carried over from English precedents, but this is uncommon.
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