Definition
A term drawn from French law meaning a purchase or bargain. In legal usage, achat denotes the act of buying or the transaction by which property is acquired for consideration. The related form acheteur (sometimes spelled achetor in older sources) means a purchaser or buyer. In certain ancient English statutes, achetor carried the specific meaning of a purveyor — an official authorized to buy provisions for the royal household.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Achat is a French word meaning "purchase" or "act of buying," still in active use in modern French.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term had no established English common usage by the nineteenth century, reflecting its status as a borrowed legal term rather than naturalized English vocabulary.
The word entered English legal literature directly from French law and French legal sources without acquiring a distinct English common meaning. Its appearance in English-language legal texts is almost entirely confined to historical and antiquarian contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
Achat is a navigational marker for French-origin legal material absorbed into English common law sources during the medieval and early modern periods. Researchers encountering the term in historical sources — particularly statutes from the reign of Edward III or treatises citing French and Norman authorities — should recognize it as a term of art tied to the feudal and mercantile law of continental origin.
The alternate form achetor carries a distinct institutional meaning in the statutory context: a crown purveyor with authority to compel sales of goods to the royal household, a power that generated significant legal controversy and parliamentary resistance. Conflating the general meaning (any purchaser) with the statutory meaning (royal purveyor) would produce a material misreading of those sources.
The term does not appear in modern American or British legal usage. Researchers finding it in a document are almost certainly working with pre-eighteenth-century material, a French legal source, or a secondary source discussing the history of contract or property law. It will not surface in modern case law or statutory compilations.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) gives the same terse entry: a purchase or bargain, citing Cowell's Interpreter — an early seventeenth-century English law dictionary that itself drew heavily on Norman French and Latin sources. The brevity of the Black's entries reflects the term's antiquarian status even at the time of those compilations.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the most substantive treatment, noting the French law origin, recording both achat and achetor, and specifically flagging the statutory usage in 36 Edward III where achetor means purveyor. Bouvier also cites Merlin's Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence, the authoritative French legal encyclopedia, signaling that researchers needing deeper treatment of the term's French law context should look to continental sources rather than English-language dictionaries.
No source disagrees on the core meaning. The only divergence is Bouvier's additional layer of institutional history, which Black's omits entirely.