SUIT is a legal term used in different senses. The word seder, which is the Latin form, is from " sequor," to follow ; and hence the general meaning of the word may be deduced.
1. A suit is a proceeding by which any legal or equitable right is enforced in a court of justice. Where the remedy is sought in a court of law, the term is synonymous with action ; when the proceeding is in equity, the term suit is alone used. It is also applied to proceedings in the ecclesiastical and admiralty courts.
2. Suit of court, in the sense of an obligation to follow, that is, to attend, and to assist in constituting a court, is either real or personal.
Suit-real, or rather suit regal, is the obligation under which all the residents within a feet or town are bound to attend the king's criminal court for the district, whether held before the king's officer and called the sheriff's tourn, or held before the grantees of beets or the officers of such grantees, and called courts-leet. [LEEr.] Suit-personal is an obligation to attend the civil courts of the lord under whom the suitor holds lands or tenements ; as in manors [Maisons] where there are copyhold, that is, customary estates, the custom imposes upon the copyholder an obligation to attend the lord's customary court. In the ease of freeholders attending as suitors the
county court or the conrt-baron (as in the case of the ancier2t tenants per baroniam attending parliament), the suitors are the judges of the court, and the sheriff in the county court, the lord or steward In the court-baron. only presiding officers with no judicial authority. lint in the criminal jurisdiction of the touru and leet, the sheriff and the grantee of the leet, or his steward, are the judges; and the suitors act only a subordinate part.
3. Besides suit of court, sects ad eurizun, there are other species of personal suit, which, like suit of court, are divisible into suit-service and suit-custom. Of those the most usual is suit of mill, Recta ad inclendinum, which is where, by tenure or by custom, the freehold or customary tenant is bound to grind his corn at the lord's mill.