VEJ - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

VEJAuthored

The Law Mind • 640 words

Definition

VEJ is an archaic term from Old French legal usage, appearing in early English law. Based on its root and contextual placement in historical sources, it functions as a variant form or abbreviation closely related to VEE (from the Old French *veer*, meaning to forbid or refuse), denoting refusal — particularly a refusal to deliver, surrender, or return a thing claimed by another. The term appears in the context of feudal pleading and property disputes, where a party's refusal to comply with a demand or return property was a legally cognizable act with procedural consequences.

The term is fragmentary in surviving sources and appears most often as an abbreviated or contracted form in law French pleading formulae. It should be understood in connection with the broader family of refusal-related terms in medieval English law.

Common Confusion

VEJ and VEE are easily conflated, and the Burrill entry itself appears to blur the boundary between them. Researchers should treat VEJ as the less-attested form and consult VEE as the primary entry. Both terms derive from the Old French *veer* and share the core meaning of refusal or prohibition, but VEE has a more developed presence in the historical sources.

Why It Matters in Research

VEJ is a marginal term that will appear almost exclusively in highly archaic sources — early plea rolls, law French treatises, and Bracton-era materials. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a variant or contraction rather than a freestanding doctrine. Its significance is navigational: when this term or its near-relatives (VEE, DEFENDE) appear in a source, the surrounding context is almost certainly a feudal-era refusal or detinue-adjacent pleading scenario.

Burrill's entry is itself fragmentary — the text is cut off mid-sentence, which is a common artifact of optical character recognition and page-break errors in digitized historical dictionaries. Researchers using Law Mind's corpus should cross-check surrounding entries (VEE, VAVASORS) to reconstruct the full passage. The truncated entry for VEJ appears to have been interrupted by a transition into the VEE entry, suggesting the two terms were treated in close proximity and may reflect the same root concept.

The term has no meaningful survival in modern legal usage. Encountering it in any post-seventeenth-century source would be highly anomalous and likely indicates a quotation from or citation to an older authority.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole identified source for this term. The entry is fragmentary as preserved, cutting off before completing the definition. What survives places VEJ in immediate proximity to VEE — defined by Burrill as a law French term meaning "refusal; refusal to deliver or return a thing" — and to the phrase *defende tort*, suggesting a pleading context in which a defendant refused to comply with a demand. The surrounding material references Bracton and describes the feudal hierarchy of barons, vavasors, and knights, placing this term squarely in the thirteenth-century common law environment.

No other historical legal dictionaries in the current Law Mind corpus contain an entry for VEJ as a standalone term. Jacob's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's, and Black's Law Dictionary do not appear to treat this term, which is consistent with its extreme archaism and probable status as a law French variant rather than a fully naturalized English legal term.

The honest research conclusion is that VEJ is either an abbreviation, a scribal variant, or an artifact of the source's pagination — and that its substantive meaning is captured more fully under VEE.

VEJmain

Burrill's Law Dictionary • 1870

(575) (duces, comites, barones, magnates sive vacen. de Jur. Mar. lib. 3, c. 6, § 7, et vasores, et milites.) Bract. fol. 5 b. And seq. again, immediately after describing barons, VEE. L. Fr. [from veer, to forbid.] as powerful men under the king (potentes In old English law. Refusal; refusal to sub rege,) he proceeds to a description of deliver or return a thing. Defende tort vavasors as men of great dignity, (viri maget force, et la torcenouse detenue, et le næ dignitatis,) adding the following etymology of the word: Vavasor enim nihil melius dici poterit quam vas sortitus ad valetudinem; for a vavasor cannot be better described than a vessel or pledge (vas) chosen for strength. Id. ibid. The term vavasor first came into use in England after the Conquest, being another form of valvasor, which was employed in the feudal law of the continent. LL. Gul. Conq. 1. 24. See Valvasor. As a title of dignity, it occurs as late as the time of Chaucer, but afterwards fell into disuse, and is now wholly antiquated. 1 Bl. Com. 403. The etymology of the word given by Bracton seems to present vas, (a vessel,) validus, (strong,) and sortitus, (chosen,) as its constituent elements, which is very different from that given of valvasor, (q. v.)