Definition
An archaic Anglo-French legal term, appearing in early common law pleading and records, meaning "you" — the second-person pronoun used in formal address. In the context of historical vouching-to-warranty proceedings, "vous" (of which "vou" is an abbreviated or variant spelling) appears in formulaic pleading language, typically as part of phrases recording that a party vouches, avows, or acknowledges an act before the court. The fragment preserved in Burrill illustrates the usage: "Vous aves icy Richard que avowa cest prise" — "you have here Richard who avows this taking" — a standard form of avowal plea in Law French.
The term carries no independent legal meaning divorced from its grammatical function in Law French pleading. Its significance is purely philological and procedural: it marks the second-person address in vouching, avowing, and warranty proceedings common to medieval English real property and replevin practice.
Common Confusion
"Vou" should not be confused with VOUCHER (the procedural act of calling a warrantor into court to defend title) or with AVOWRY (a defendant's affirmative pleading in replevin justifying a taking). The pronoun appears within the language of those proceedings but is not itself a term of art for either.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "vou" or "vous" in early Year Book entries, plea rolls, or transcribed abridgments should treat it as a pronoun within Law French formulae, not as a substantive legal term. The risk of misreading is real: abbreviated and phonetically rendered Law French in manuscript and early print sources frequently drops the terminal "s," producing forms like "vou," "vol," or "vo" that can appear to be distinct headwords rather than fragments of longer constructions.
The Burrill entry itself illustrates the hazard — the extracted passage is a fragment of avowal pleading that bleeds across a column break, and "vou" appears as an artifact of that pagination rather than as a free-standing legal concept.
When tracing avowal and vouching-to-warranty proceedings in the Law Mind corpus, researchers should look past the pronoun to the operative verbs: "avowa" (avows), "aves" (have/has), and the noun "prise" (taking, seizure). These carry the substantive procedural meaning. Cross-referencing under VOUCHER, AVOWRY, and WARRANTY will yield the doctrinal content that pleading fragments like this one illustrate but do not define.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill does not treat "vou" as a substantive legal term. The entry in which it appears is primarily devoted to VOLUNTAS and VOLUNTE, and the Law French passage containing "vous" is quoted as an illustrative example of avowal pleading from P. 8 Edw. III. 19 — a Year Book reference to a plea of the eighth year of Edward III's reign. Burrill quotes it to illuminate the use of avowry formulas, not to define the pronoun itself.
No other historical dictionaries in the standard shelf — not Tomlin, Bouvier, Black, or Jacob — carry "vou" as a headword. Its appearance as a dictionary entry in Burrill is an artifact of the alphabetical arrangement catching a Law French pronoun that happens to fall between substantive headwords.