Definition
In old law French, *adresser* means to prepare. The term appears in medieval legal usage and corresponds to preparatory acts — making ready or putting in order — in the context of legal proceedings or instruments. It is a term of limited independent legal significance, appearing mainly as a linguistic artifact in archaic legal texts and formularies rather than as a term of operative legal doctrine.
Common Confusion
*Adresser* should not be confused with the modern legal usage of *address* (as in an address to the court, or address as the location of a party). The shared root is misleading: modern legal English uses *address* in senses that are directional or locational, whereas *adresser* in Law French carries the preparatory sense of readying or putting in order. Researchers who encounter *adresser* in a historical document and interpret it through the lens of modern English *address* risk misreading the passage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *adresser* in primary sources should recognize it as a Law French term functioning as a procedural or instrumental verb rather than a term of art with defined legal consequences. Its primary value to the corpus researcher is contextual: when it appears in a historical document, it signals that the surrounding text is likely concerned with the preparation of a pleading, instrument, or formal legal act.
Law French terms of this type were frequently used in English legal proceedings through the seventeenth century and appear in Year Books, plea rolls, and formularies. Because Law French was a technical professional dialect that borrowed from medieval Norman French while diverging from both continental French and common English, the meaning of individual words cannot be reliably inferred from either modern French or English cognates. *Adresser* is a case in point: the modern French *adresser* carries a meaning centered on addressing or directing (a letter, a person, a speech), whereas the legal usage recorded by Burrill is the older sense of preparation or making ready.
Researchers working in Burrill should note that his entry for *adresser* is minimal — a one-word gloss citing Kelham's *Glossary of Norman and Old French Words* — and immediately precedes a cluster of related archaic terms (*adrhamire*, *arhamire*, *arramare*) that concern solemn undertakings and pledges. The proximity of these entries is not coincidental: the preparatory sense of *adresser* is conceptually adjacent to the formal pledging language of the *arramare* family of terms, both appearing in formularies governing how parties constituted or readied themselves for legal obligations.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is the primary historical dictionary record in the Law Mind corpus for this term. It consists of a two-word definition — "to prepare" — attributed to Kelham, with no further elaboration. This brevity is itself informative: Burrill, whose dictionary was comprehensive and discursive for significant terms, treated *adresser* as a minor vocabulary item requiring only placement and attribution, not analysis.
Kelham's *Glossary* (1779) is the proximate source Burrill cites, and it reflects the antiquarian tradition of cataloguing Law French terms to aid readers of the Year Books. Historical dictionaries in this tradition generally agree that *adresser* in legal usage means "to prepare" or "to make ready," without attributing to it any technical procedural role beyond that general sense.
No significant divergence among historical sources has been identified for this term. The entry is stable and narrow.