Definition
In legal usage, *very* functions as an adjective meaning true, real, actual, or immediate. It does not carry the common modern sense of "to a great degree" but instead serves as a term of precision, indicating that a relationship, status, or value is genuine and direct rather than constructive, derivative, or nominal.
The term appears most prominently in the phrase *very lord and very tenant* (*verus dominus et verus tenens*), used in the old English and Norman French feudal law to designate persons standing in an immediate tenurial relationship to one another — as distinguished from those connected by intermediate tenure or by legal fiction. A man was not recognized as the *very tenant* until he had performed attornment to the lord by some act of service, giving the relationship its operative legal character.
The phrase *a la very value* — to the true or actual value — reflects the same usage, here applied in the context of assessment or reckoning, where *very* marks the figure as the genuine amount rather than an estimated, constructive, or discounted one.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Primarily an adverb meaning "to a high degree" or "extremely" (e.g., "very fast"). As an adjective, it retains a secondary sense of "actual" or "precise," but this usage is archaic or literary in modern English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "True; real; actual; veritable." Illustrated by biblical and literary citations in which *very* modifies a noun to indicate genuineness — *very friends*, *very son*, *very justice*.
The legal and common meanings were once aligned: both Webster's and Burrill employ *very* to mean *true* or *real*. The divergence is entirely modern. Contemporary readers encountering *very* in a legal instrument or feudal record will almost certainly misread it as an intensifier rather than a term of substantive legal precision. In archaic legal texts, *very* is never emphatic decoration — it is always a statement of authentic, immediate, or actual status.
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Why It Matters in Research
The principal trap here is linguistic. Any researcher working with pre-modern English legal records, Year Books, abridgments, or Norman French sources must recognize that *very* in those texts means *true* or *actual*, not *extremely*. Misreading *very lord* as an intensified form of *lord* produces nonsense; reading it correctly identifies a specific feudal relationship with defined legal consequences — particularly regarding the requirement of attornment.
The term surfaces in sources concentrated in feudal land tenure: abridgments such as Brooke's *Abridgment* (cited by Burrill under *Hariot*), the *Old Natura Brevium*, and Cowell's *Interpreter*. Researchers using Law Mind sources on feudal tenure, copyhold, or serjeanty should flag every occurrence of *very* as a potential term of art requiring the historical rather than the modern reading.
The phrase *a la very value* has a specific procedural context in assessing damages or levying execution; it signals that courts or officers were directed to ascertain the genuine market or intrinsic value, not a conventional or formulaic one. This is relevant when tracing the historical development of valuation standards in property and probate proceedings.
Because *very* is not a discrete headword in most modern legal dictionaries — and because its adjectival legal meaning has been entirely eclipsed by its common adverbial use — it is frequently invisible as a legal term. Researchers encountering it in translated or modernized texts may find the word simply dropped or paraphrased without explanation.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is one of the few American legal dictionaries to treat *very* as a term of art at all, and his treatment is brief but precise. He correctly identifies the Norman French and Latin roots (*verus*), supplies the operative phrase *very lord and very tenant*, and notes the condition of attornment that gave the status its legal effect. The Cowell citation is significant: Cowell's *Interpreter* (1607) is among the earliest English legal dictionaries and treats this usage in its original feudal context.
No major American or English legal dictionary of the nineteenth or twentieth century carries a substantive entry for *very* in this sense. Bouvier omits it. Black's does not give it independent treatment. This absence reflects the term's displacement from active legal vocabulary rather than any doubt about its historical meaning. Burrill's entry thus serves as one of the few accessible reference points in the Law Mind corpus for this usage.
Webster's 1913 independently corroborates the adjectival meaning — "true; real; actual; veritable" — and its biblical and literary examples show that the usage was still recognized as legitimate English in the nineteenth century, even if receding. This alignment between Webster's and Burrill is useful: it confirms that the legal and literary senses were once unified, and that the purely intensifying adverbial sense now dominant is a later development.
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Jurisdictional Note
This usage is specific to the English common law tradition and its feudal antecedents. It has no operative role in modern American, English, or Commonwealth legal drafting. Researchers encounter it exclusively in historical sources dealing with feudal tenure, medieval pleading, or early modern conveyancing.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See LAW MIND ENCYCLOPEDIA: Tenure (for the feudal framework in which *very lord* and *very tenant* operated); Attornment (for the act that conferred the status of *very tenant*); Valuation (for the procedural context of *a la very value*).
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