Definition
In old English practice, a vouchee — that is, the person called upon or summoned to warrant title to land in the context of a real action. The term is Law French, derived from *vocher* (to vouch, to call as a warrantor). When a tenant in a real action was challenged on their title, they could "vouch" a third party — the voche — to come in and defend that title, on the theory that the voche had originally warranted the land to the tenant.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in very early common law sources dealing with real property actions, particularly the writ of right and related real actions. Researchers encountering *voche* in medieval or early modern legal records should understand it as the passive participant in the vouching process — the party being called, not the party calling. The distinction between *vocher* (the verb, or the party doing the vouching) and *voche* (the person vouched) is easy to miss in manuscript sources where spelling is inconsistent and abbreviations common.
The practical significance of the voche in medieval land law was considerable: if the voche failed to appear when summoned, the tenant could obtain a default judgment, and the voche's land might be subject to recovery by the tenant as compensation. The phrase preserved in Britton — *le voche n'est mye trove* ("the vouchee is not found") — describes exactly this scenario of non-appearance, which had specific procedural consequences.
By the time of Blackstone's Commentaries, real actions had fallen deeply out of use, and terms like *voche* had effectively passed out of active legal vocabulary. Researchers working in sources post-seventeenth century will rarely encounter this term in operative legal text; its appearance in later sources is almost always historical commentary or antiquarian legal writing.
The vouching process also gave rise to the broader procedural device of vouching to warranty in commercial contexts, which survived in attenuated form long after the original real actions were abolished. Researchers tracing warranty doctrine should be aware that the conceptual lineage runs through terms like *voche*, *vouch*, and *warrantor*, even though the procedural form changed substantially.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary English-language source preserving this term with any precision. Burrill identifies *voche* as Law French, defines it concisely as a vouchee, and provides the Britton citation, which is the closest thing to a primary source gloss available. Britton (c. 1290), written in Law French, is one of the earliest systematic treatises on English law and reflects practice contemporary with the height of the real actions.
No significant divergence exists among historical legal dictionaries on this term, largely because so few cover it at all. Its rarity in the dictionaries reflects its status as a term that had already become archaic by the time systematic legal lexicography developed in earnest. Researchers should not expect to find *voche* in later dictionaries such as Black's or Bouvier's, which were compiled after the real actions had been abolished by statute in England (3 & 4 Wm. IV, c. 27, 1833) and had long since fallen into disuse in American practice.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs entirely to the historical common law of England and those American jurisdictions that inherited English real property procedure. It has no operative legal significance in any modern jurisdiction. Its relevance today is purely historical and antiquarian.