Definition
One who amends. In historical legal usage, *amender* is a Law French term meaning to make good, to make up for, or to compensate — used in early common law pleading and procedure to describe the act of remedying a deficiency, satisfying a default, or compensating for damages. The term appears in Britton and related Anglo-Norman legal texts as a verb form carrying the specific legal sense of rectifying an obligation or curing a legal wrong.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who amends.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who amends.
The common and legal definitions share surface meaning, but the legal usage carries a narrower, technically specific sense rooted in Law French procedural and obligatory contexts. Where common usage treats "amending" broadly as any correction or revision, the legal term *amender* in historical sources specifically denotes the satisfaction of a legal duty — curing a default or compensating a damaged party — rather than mere revision of a document or statement.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *amender* in early common law texts should resist reading it through the lens of modern "amendment" practice (as in amending a pleading or statute). The operative meaning in sources like Britton is compensatory and performative: to *amender* a default is to make it good, not simply to correct a record. This distinction matters when tracing how liability and satisfaction of judgment were described in medieval and early modern English law.
The term will appear almost exclusively in Law French contexts. Researchers working in Year Books, Britton, or early plea rolls may encounter it as a verb form rather than a noun. The English equivalent ("one who amends") is too generic to reliably signal the same compensatory legal meaning.
Because the term belongs to the Law French stratum of English legal vocabulary, it connects to a broader family of compensatory and remedial language — *amends*, *amenagement*, *dommages* — that shaped early common law doctrine on damages and default. Researchers tracing the conceptual history of damages, satisfaction of judgment, or default remedies should treat *amender* as part of that lineage rather than as a procedural term about revision.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this term, and its entry is spare but precise. Burrill renders *amender* as a Law French infinitive with three related meanings: to amend, to make good, and to compensate. The citations to Britton (c. 21 and c. 27) anchor both senses: *defautes amender* (to make good defaults) and *les damages amender* (to compensate for damages). These two usages, though related, are distinct — one addresses procedural failure, the other substantive harm.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries (Black's, Bouvier's, Jacob's, Tomlin's) carry entries for *amender* as a standalone term, which itself signals how narrowly the term was treated in the Anglo-American legal tradition. Its functional content was absorbed into English-language doctrine under terms like *amends*, *satisfaction*, and *damages* well before the major dictionary-compilation period. Burrill preserves it essentially as a philological record of Law French usage.