Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "another" or "other." Altre appears in medieval English legal records as a function word within Law French formulaic expressions, where it operates much as the Latin *alter* does — designating a second or additional party, thing, or interest distinct from the one already named. Its possessive form, *altrei*, carried the sense of "another's" and was used to denote the property or interest belonging to someone other than the party before the court.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An obsolete form of "alter," meaning to change or make different.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): N/A — the term does not appear in Webster's 1913 as a standard English word.
The English word "alter" and the Law French "altre" share a common Latin ancestor (*alter*, meaning "other"), but they arrived at different destinations. In legal records, *altre* is not about change or modification — it marks a distinction between persons or interests. A researcher encountering *autre* or *altre* in old pleadings should read it as "another [party/person/thing]," not as a verb of transformation.
Common Confusion
Autre / Autre droit / Autrefois: Modern legal usage has largely displaced *altre* with the anglicized Law French form *autre*, which survives in compound expressions such as *autre droit* ("another's right") and the plea *autrefois acquit* ("formerly acquitted"). Researchers may encounter both spellings in Year Book and early common law sources; *altre* is the older orthographic form, while *autre* became the normalized spelling as Law French was regularized. The two represent the same underlying word at different stages of scribal convention, not two distinct legal concepts.
Why It Matters in Research
Altre is a term researchers encounter rather than deploy. It will not appear in modern statutes, opinions, or secondary sources — its habitat is the Year Books, early plea rolls, and medieval formularies. The primary research trap is orthographic: Law French was never standardized, and the same word appears across manuscripts as *altre*, *autre*, *alter*, and variant spellings depending on scribe, period, and regional practice. A corpus search limited to one spelling will miss occurrences under the others.
The Burrill citation to *Yearb. M. 9 Edw. III. 53* situates the term firmly in early 14th-century English legal records — the era when Law French was the dominant language of the common law courts. Researchers working in that period should treat *altre* as a routine connective term, not a term of art with independent legal significance. Its significance is syntactic: it identifies which party, which interest, or which estate is being discussed.
For corpus purposes, *altre* is most likely to surface in passages dealing with multi-party disputes, concurrent rights, and possessory actions — contexts where distinguishing "this party's" interest from "another's" was essential to the pleading. The compound *autre droit* is the form most likely to carry substantive legal weight and merits its own research thread.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal English-language authority offering a direct entry for *altre*, and its treatment is brief but accurate: the term is defined as "another; other" with the possessive form *altrei* noted separately. Burrill's entry is useful mainly as a pointer to the Year Book source and as confirmation that the term was recognized as Law French rather than Latin. No significant divergence exists among historical dictionary sources on this point — the term is too narrow and too clearly a function word to have generated competing definitions. What historical dictionaries collectively fail to address is the full range of orthographic variants, which a modern corpus researcher must account for independently.
Jurisdictional Note
Autre and its variants, including *altre*, belong to the English common law tradition and appear in English legal records. Scots law, which drew on a different French legal vocabulary, and civil law jurisdictions present different terminological traditions. For English common law sources, no meaningful jurisdictional variation exists — the term is archaic across all jurisdictions that inherited the common law.