“John Doe” and “Jane Doe” are common placeholder names in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Used when someone’s identity is unknown or protected, they regularly appear in real-life contexts as well as in TV courtroom dramas and true crime shows. But these simple-sounding names aren’t modern inventions — they go all the way back to the 14th century.
The name “John Doe” (along with “Richard Roe”) appeared in English legal parlance during the reign of Edward III, king of England from 1327 to 1377. Its origins are in a medieval British legal process called an action of ejectment, originally used to protect tenants from landlords.
Under the common laws of the time, proving ownership of a property could be a long and complicated process. To avoid this, claimants used the action of ejectment procedure, creating hypothetical people to serve a particular purpose. It went something like this: To prove ownership of a property, the real-life claimant, in the guise of a landlord, invented an imaginary lease by a fictitious person, known as John Doe, and another person, Richard Roe, who had allegedly ejected (evicted) the lessee. To determine the rights of these two hypothetical people, the courts had to first establish who actually owned the property — which, for the real-life claimant, was the whole point of the exercise. Using “John Doe” and “Richard Roe” saved a lot of time and hassle by forcing the courts to more swiftly determine ownership of the property.
“John Doe” or “Jane Doe” are handy tools for TV crime show writers, but they do create some confusion in the legal system. It’s hard to search for a specific case file when there are countless “Jane Does” from other cases. If there are multiple anonymous parties in a case, “Richard Roe” is still used, or alliterative names from the rest of the alphabet have been employed: for example, “Paul and Pauline Poe,” “Frances Foe,” and even “Xerxes Xoe,” according to an article in the legal journal for Duke Law School. To reduce confusion in modern courts, unique pseudonyms, initials, or other anonymizing replacements are preferred today.
No one is entirely sure why the names “John Doe” and “Richard Roe” were used in the 14th century. It’s possible they were the names of real people, used in one of the early actions of ejectment. Or they were simply invented. “John” and “Richard” were common first names at the time, while “Doe” and “Roe” were both associated with deer. We’ll likely never know exactly how or why these particular names were originally chosen, but we do know that they stuck. “John Doe” appears in legal texts across the following centuries, while its female equivalent, “Jane Doe,” has been in use since at least the early 1700s. (“Mary Major” is sometimes used for anonymous female parties in modern legal cases.) Their creators could hardly have imagined that today, hundreds of years later, the “John Doe” and “Jane Doe” monikers would be used in media, courts, and hospitals across the globe.
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