Definition
An Old Law French term meaning "to view," "to see," or "to inspect." Used in medieval English legal procedure to describe the act of official visual examination — most commonly the inspection of a body and its wounds by a coroner and jurors, or the formal viewing of persons or property in the course of legal proceedings. The term appears in procedural directives embedded in early common law texts, functioning as an infinitive verb rather than a noun or title.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering VOER in original medieval sources or early English law transcriptions should recognize it as procedural language, not a term of art with doctrinal weight. It surfaces most frequently in coroner's inquest materials and in writs or plea rolls directing parties or officers to physically examine something before proceeding. Because Law French was the working language of English courts from roughly the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century, terms like VOER appear throughout plea rolls, year books, and early treatises without translation — translators and abridgers often rendered it simply as "view" without noting the original.
The practical trap for corpus researchers is conflation with the noun VIEW (or VISNE, VENU), which has independent doctrinal significance in English law — particularly in the context of the jury's traditional right to view real property in dispute. VOER as a verb describes the act; VIEW as a noun can denote a formal procedural step with its own rules and consequences. Distinguish carefully when the surrounding text is ambiguous.
Burrill is the principal historical dictionary source that captures VOER. It does not appear as a headword in most modern legal dictionaries, which reflects both the obsolescence of Law French and the term's purely procedural rather than substantive character. Researchers working with Britton, Bracton, or Fleta in their original or early translated forms are most likely to encounter it.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary — and in the Law Mind corpus, essentially the only — dictionary treatment of VOER. Burrill quotes directly from Britton (c. 1290), one of the earliest systematic treatises on English law, in two illustrative passages: the first directing the coroner and jurors to go and view the body and its wounds (*voer le cors, et les playes*); the second directing that a tenant depart without a day (*voet sauns jour*). These quotations are instructive not merely as translations but as evidence of how the term functioned syntactically in medieval legal directives — always as a verb in a procedural command.
Burrill also notes, immediately following the VOER entry, the related term VOEVE (or VOEF), meaning widow, which is etymologically and contextually distinct. The proximity of these entries in the dictionary reflects alphabetical coincidence, not conceptual connection; researchers should not infer any relationship between the two terms.
No significant divergence exists across historical sources on the meaning of VOER — it is uniformly "to view" — though variation in spelling (voer, voet, voir) is common across manuscripts and printed editions of early texts.
Jurisdictional Note
VOER is a term of historical English law with no independent jurisdictional application in modern common law systems. It does not carry forward into American, Canadian, or Australian legal usage. Its relevance is confined to research in medieval English legal sources and their early modern transcriptions.