Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "these." Used in early English legal records and pleading as a demonstrative reference, equivalent to the modern English "these" when pointing to persons or things previously mentioned or immediately at hand. The term belongs to the cluster of Law French demonstratives that appear in medieval English legal documents, alongside the related forms YCEUX and YCEAUX, which carried the meaning "those" or "them."
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Why It Matters in Research
YCESTES is encountered almost exclusively in transcriptions or facsimiles of medieval English legal records — plea rolls, writs, and formal instruments drafted in Law French before that language was displaced from English legal practice by the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731. A researcher meeting this word in a primary source needs to recognize it immediately as a demonstrative pronoun, not a proper name or a term of legal art with substantive legal meaning. Misreading it as a noun or name could corrupt the interpretation of the passage.
The chief research trap is confusion within the demonstrative family. YCESTES ("these"), YCEUX/YCEAUX ("those" or "them"), and similar forms are visually similar in manuscript hands and early printed collections. In highly abbreviated medieval manuscripts, these words can be contracted further, increasing the risk of misidentification. When indexing or searching digitized historical sources, researchers should be aware that variant spellings are common and that these terms will not appear in most modern legal search tools or indexes.
Because Law French was a specialized legal dialect — not identical to continental French — general French dictionaries are unreliable guides. The standard reference for this vocabulary remains Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779), which Burrill cites directly. Researchers working in Anglo-Norman legal sources should consult Kelham alongside the *Anglo-Norman Dictionary* for variant forms.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry in the Law Mind corpus for YCESTES, defining it tersely as "These" and citing Kelham as the authority. The entry appears in close proximity to YCEUX and YCEAUX ("those; them"), also sourced to Kelham, which signals that Burrill treated these as a natural cluster of related Law French demonstratives.
No other dictionary in the Law Mind shelf addresses YCESTES independently. The brevity of Burrill's entry is typical of his treatment of purely functional Law French vocabulary — words that carry no independent legal doctrine but are necessary to parse historical instruments. The historical dictionaries collectively do not elaborate on YCESTES beyond the gloss, which is itself appropriate: there is no legal doctrine attached to the word. Its entire significance is grammatical and philological.
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