Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "to see" or "to view." Appearing in early English legal records and pleadings, *veyer* functioned as an infinitive — "to see" — and surfaces in formulaic legal expressions such as *veyer est* ("it is to be seen") and the conjugated form *veyet* ("sees"). The term belongs to the vocabulary of medieval English law courts, where Law French served as the dominant language of pleading and record-keeping from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century.
Common Confusion
*Veyer* should not be confused with the English legal term *view* or the procedural writ of *view*, though they share the same root concept. The writ of view (*visus*) was a formal procedural mechanism allowing a party in a real action to inspect disputed land before trial; *veyer* is simply the Law French verbal form underlying that and related concepts. Researchers encountering *veyer* in a manuscript or early printed source are seeing the linguistic ancestor of procedural terms, not a distinct legal doctrine.
Why It Matters in Research
*Veyer* is primarily a paleographic and linguistic hazard rather than a substantive legal concept. Researchers working in manuscript year books, plea rolls, or early printed abridgments will encounter it embedded in formulaic Latin-French mixed phrases. Its significance is navigational: recognizing *veyer* and its inflected forms (*veyet*, *veyer est*) prevents misreading or misindexing a passage that is simply expressing "it is to be seen" or "the court views" — common transitional phrases in medieval judicial records.
The term predates English legal printing and is almost entirely absent from post-seventeenth-century sources. After the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730 (4 Geo. II, c. 26) abolished Law French in English courts, terms like *veyer* survived only in historical glossaries and antiquarian legal scholarship. Researchers should not expect to find *veyer* operative in any common law jurisdiction after the early eighteenth century.
Because Law French vocabulary was inconsistently spelled across copyists and centuries, variant spellings (*veier*, *voir* in related contexts) may appear in adjacent sources. The connection to *voir dire* — literally "to speak the truth," from the same Law French tradition — is linguistic but not doctrinal; the two terms occupy entirely different procedural territories.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry in full: "L. Fr. To see; to view. Veyer est; it is to be seen. Veyet; sees." The sourcing note to Kelham refers to Robert Kelham's *A Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779), a standard reference for Law French terminology used by nineteenth-century legal lexicographers. Burrill's entry is characteristically sparse, as befits a term with no independent doctrinal weight — it is a verbal building block rather than a legal concept.
No substantive divergence exists among historical legal dictionaries on this term because there is nothing substantive to dispute. The entry is linguistic, not doctrinal, and earlier glossarists including Kelham are in agreement. What historical sources collectively omit is any guidance on how *veyer* fits within the broader procedural vocabulary of real actions — a gap that modern scholarship on medieval English legal procedure, including work building on Maitland and Pollock, fills more adequately.