Definition
An obsolete Anglo-French legal term referring to viewers — persons appointed or sent by a court to inspect a particular place or person and report their findings back to the court. The term carried two recognized applications in early English practice:
1. Court-appointed inspectors of places. Persons dispatched by a court to physically view a location at issue in litigation, so that the court could make a better-informed decision about the matter in dispute. These functioned as an early form of court-commissioned fact-finders, analogous in purpose (though not in procedure) to modern judicial site inspections or court-appointed experts.
2. Viewers of essoined persons. Persons sent to verify whether a party who had claimed an essoin de malo lecti — that is, an excuse for non-appearance based on illness — was genuinely too sick to attend court, or was feigning illness to avoid appearance. Their role was to observe and report on the physical condition of the essoined party.
The term is now entirely obsolete and appears only in historical sources. It has no current legal application.
Common Confusion
Vejours should not be conflated with the related concepts of viewers or visors as those terms appear in later and more recognizable English legal contexts. Burrill's notes the Latin equivalent visores, and researchers may encounter that Latin form in medieval court records where vejours appears in the Anglo-French. The two forms reference the same office but appear in different documentary traditions: vejours in Anglo-French legal instruments, visores in Latin records. Neither should be confused with the modern procedural mechanism of a view, which survives in some jurisdictions but operates under entirely different procedural rules.
Why It Matters in Research
Vejours is a term a researcher will encounter only in medieval and early modern English legal records — Year Books, early plea rolls, and the foundational treatise and dictionary literature that codified Anglo-French legal vocabulary. Its research value is almost entirely contextual: understanding what vejours were helps decode procedural passages in early records where the court's management of proof and appearance is otherwise opaque.
Two specific traps deserve attention. First, the essoin function. The de malo lecti essoin was a formal procedural device, and the appointment of vejours to verify illness was a standard judicial response to it. Researchers working on medieval attendance, default, and appearance practice need to recognize vejours as a procedural checkpoint in that system, not merely a curiosity. Second, the place-inspection function connects vejours to a longer lineage of court-supervised views that eventually fed into modern procedures for judicial site inspections and, in some jurisdictions, the view in civil and criminal trials. Tracing that lineage requires recognizing vejours as an early node.
Burrill's entry is partially garbled in surviving form, appearing to conflate vejours with an unrelated maritime freight term — a transcription or compilation artifact that can mislead researchers relying on that source without cross-checking.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries agree on the core meaning but differ in scope and reliability. Black's (both editions) provides the most substantive account, drawing on Cowell's Interpreter for the dual function: place-viewers and illness-verifiers. The two Black's editions are nearly identical on this term, with minor orthographic variation in the essoin terminology (exsoin vs. essoin).
Bouvier's is characteristically spare, describing vejours simply as an obsolete term for viewers or experts — the addition of "experts" is a slight expansion that none of the other sources support with precision. Bouvier may be gesturing toward the specialized, quasi-technical function of court-appointed viewers, but calling them "experts" in the modern sense would be an overstatement.
Burrill's entry is the least reliable here. The surviving text appears to have been corrupted or misfiled, running vejours into what reads like a maritime freight entry — an artifact of compilation rather than a reflection of the term's actual meaning. Researchers should treat Burrill's vejours entry with caution and defer to Black's and Cowell as the authoritative sources.
None of the historical dictionaries situate vejours within the broader procedural system of essoins with any depth. For that context, researchers must move beyond the dictionary literature to treatise sources on medieval English procedure.
Jurisdictional Note
Vejours is exclusively a term of historical English law. It has no recognized counterpart or direct descendant in American legal practice. Jurisdictions that retain some form of the view as a procedural device do so under modern statutory authority bearing no terminological connection to vejours.