Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning vengeance or revenge in a legal sense — specifically, the formal pursuit of justice for a wrongful death through the procedure known as an appeal of felony. The term appears in early English legal records to describe the act of a private party seeking legal redress for homicide or other serious wrong by initiating an appeal (a private criminal accusation) rather than relying on the Crown's prosecution. "Suer veniaunce de la mort" meant to sue or prosecute vengeance for a death, which was accomplished through the appeal of felony procedure.
The word carries no modern legal meaning. It survives only as a historical term found in early English legal texts written in Law French.
Common Confusion
The term should not be confused with modern concepts of victim's rights or civil wrongful death actions, though it occupies a related conceptual space. In the medieval English system, the appeal of felony was a private procedural right, not a claim for monetary damages. A researcher encountering "veniaunce" in an early source should resist mapping it onto either the modern criminal prosecution model or the modern civil tort model — it belongs to a third category, the private appeal, that has since been abolished entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in pre-15th century English legal materials, particularly texts connected to Britton, the late-13th century law treatise written in Law French that systematized and explained English criminal procedure under Edward I. Burrill cites Britton chapters 1 and 23 directly, and those remain the primary source context for this term.
The key navigational point: "veniaunce" is not merely archaic vocabulary for a concept that persists — it is a term tied to a procedure, the appeal of felony, that was formally abolished in England in 1819 following the notorious Ashford v. Thornton case. Tracing the term therefore means tracing the life and death of the appeal of felony itself.
Researchers working backward through criminal law history should be alert to the distinction between the Crown's appeal (prosecution) and the private party's appeal (veniaunce). Medieval sources use "appeal" in a sense entirely distinct from its modern meaning of appellate review, and the presence of "veniaunce" signals that the text is describing a private accusation, not a state prosecution. Confusing the two will produce significant misreadings of early criminal procedure.
Law French presents its own research challenge: spelling in these sources is inconsistent, and variant forms of the word may appear. Researchers should search flexibly rather than relying on a single spelling.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary entry recovered for this term and is characteristically economical: a translation ("vengeance; revenge; an avenging"), the procedural context (the appeal of felony), an illustrative Latin-French phrase, and citations to Britton. No other major historical dictionaries — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Black's early editions — appear to have carried a dedicated entry for this term, which reflects how narrowly specialized and historically confined its use was.
Burrill's entry usefully anchors the term to Britton rather than to case law, which is appropriate: "veniaunce" is a term of legal literature rather than of court reporting. The Britton citations are genuine and checkable. Researchers who want the term in fuller doctrinal context should go directly to Britton, particularly the chapters on appeals of felony, where the private party's right to sue for vengeance is set out as part of a coherent procedural framework.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any account of how this private-vengeance model was eventually displaced — first by the expansion of Crown prosecution and ultimately by formal abolition. That story must be assembled from doctrinal history sources rather than from dictionary entries.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to early English law and has no recognized counterpart in American legal materials. Colonial American jurisdictions inherited English criminal procedure but not, in any functional way, the appeal of felony, which had already become vestigial before the colonial period.