Definition
VEIER is a Law French term with two distinct meanings that appear in medieval English legal records and Year Books:
1. (Verb) To see; to view. The past tense form is veit (sees; seen). Derived from the Latin videre.
2. (Noun) A widow. Equivalent forms include veif, vefve, and vefue. Related nominal form: veifuage, meaning widowhood.
The term appears in a cluster of closely related Law French vocabulary that a researcher must distinguish: veier (to see / a widow), veies or veez (plural of vee, meaning distresses forbidden to be replevied — that is, the refusal to release to an owner cattle that had been distrained), and veigner or veiner (to come, from the Latin venire).
Common Confusion
Four phonetically and orthographically similar Law French terms occupy the same documentary neighborhood and are easily conflated:
- VEIER — to see; or, a widow
- VEIES / VEEZ — plural of vee; distresses not subject to replevin
- VEIF / VEFVE / VEFUE — a widow (variant spellings of the nominal sense of veier)
- VEIGNER / VEINER — to come
The overlap is not merely a modern transcription hazard. Medieval scribal practice produced inconsistent spelling across manuscripts, and the same root letters could signal entirely different legal concepts depending on context. A passage recording that a widow (veier) was denied replevin of distrained cattle (veies) could present both senses in close proximity, compounding the risk of misreading.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal sources — Year Books, plea rolls, treatises in Law French — will encounter veier and its cognates in contexts where mistranslation carries substantive legal consequences.
The verbal sense (to see / to view) appears in procedural settings: the view (veier) was a formal step in real property litigation, allowing a party to inspect land in dispute before pleading. Confusing this procedural term with the nominal sense (widow) in a property record could produce a fundamentally wrong reading of who held an interest in land.
The nominal sense (widow) matters because widows held distinct legal status in medieval English law — rights of dower, rights of freebench, procedural capacities and incapacities that differed from those of femes sole and femes covert. Identifying whether a document uses veier to mean a widow as a legal actor, or veier as a verb describing an act of viewing, is a threshold interpretive question.
The cluster term veies/veez (distresses not repleviable) touches a different area entirely: the law of distress, replevin, and withernam. Burrill flags this as a plural of vee, not a form of veier, but the visual similarity in manuscript hands is genuine. Researchers using digitized or transcribed Year Book materials should verify which term is actually present before building an argument on the passage.
Because these are Law French terms, they will not appear in modern statutory or regulatory sources. Their relevance is confined to historical legal research, medieval property law, early English procedure, and the interpretation of pre-modern records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source for this entry, and it is the most useful point of access in the Law Mind corpus for Law French vocabulary of this period. Burrill's treatment is conscientious in attributing variant spellings and in cross-referencing Kelham's Normand-French glossary, which remains the standard specialized reference for Law French in English legal records.
Burrill does not synthesize the legal significance of veier beyond identification and translation. He correctly notes the Latin roots (videre for veier as to see; vidua is implied for the widow sense, though not stated explicitly; venire for veigner). Researchers should treat Burrill as a gateway term — reliable for identification and spelling variants, but requiring supplementation from substantive historical sources on dower, replevin, or real property procedure for analytical depth.
No other Law Mind shelf dictionary covers this term. The absence of coverage in later American legal dictionaries (Black's and successors) is expected: these terms dropped from active legal use as Law French was displaced by English in the courts, a process substantially complete by the eighteenth century.