Definition
Accessement is an archaic Law French term meaning addition. It derives from the Latin accessio and appears in early common law sources as a variant form for the concept of adding to or joining one thing to another. The term is not in active legal use today. Where the underlying concept survives, it appears under the doctrine of accession — the principle governing what happens when one thing is added to, incorporated into, or merged with another, particularly in the context of property law.
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Common Confusion
Accessement should not be confused with assessment (the levying of a tax or charge), despite superficial phonetic similarity. The confusion is easy to make in handwritten historical records and early printed sources, where the spellings could vary considerably. The two terms are entirely unrelated in meaning and origin. Accessement is also distinct from accession as used in constitutional and public law contexts (such as a nation acceding to a treaty or a ruler coming to power), though all share the same Latin root.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-modern English legal manuscripts, Year Books, or early printed abridgments may encounter accessement as a variant spelling or term where a modern editor would write accession. Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language, cited by Burrill, is the primary authority Burrill relies on here, which signals this term belongs to the Norman-French stratum of English legal vocabulary — the layer of terminology that entered common law through the courts of medieval England.
Three practical traps for corpus researchers:
First, optical character recognition (OCR) errors in digitized historical sources will frequently render accessement as assessment or vice versa, so keyword searches for either term in historical corpora should account for the other.
Second, the substantive doctrine to which accessement points — the joining of property — is treated in historical sources under several different headings: accession, confusion, adjunction, and specification. A researcher tracking the doctrine across time cannot rely on any single term to locate all relevant sources.
Third, because this is a Law French term, it will appear almost exclusively in pre-1700 English legal sources. Post-1700 treatises and cases will have replaced it with the Latinized accession or anglicized additions doctrine. Searching for accessement in 18th-century or later sources is unlikely to be productive.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantial historical dictionary treatment: "L. Fr. [Lat. accessio.] Addition. Kelham." The entry is minimal, functioning as a gloss rather than a definition, and Burrill appropriately defers to Kelham for the Norman French linguistic context. No other major historical legal dictionary — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — appears to carry the term under this spelling, which itself confirms accessement as a term of narrow historical range rather than a term of art with ongoing doctrinal significance.
The sparseness of historical dictionary coverage is informative: it indicates the term was not current in legal practice at the time these dictionaries were compiled (mid-to-late 19th century) and was already being preserved as antiquarian vocabulary rather than working legal language.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Property Law Encyclopedia — Personal Property: Accession and Confusion (property_135): This is the primary substantive entry for the doctrine accessement names. Researchers who encounter this term in historical sources and need to understand the underlying legal concept should begin here.
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