Definition
An obsolete Law French adjective meaning "that which may be brought, led, or carried." In its legal application, the term carried three related but distinct senses: (1) capable of being physically brought or led before a tribunal; (2) capable of being cited or summoned to appear; and (3) capable of being driven or conveyed away. The term is the adjectival form of the verb amesner (also rendered amener), and functions as the direct ancestor of the modern legal term AMENABLE. It appears exclusively in early English legal sources drawing on Law French usage and should be understood as an archaic spelling variant, not a term with independent substantive content distinct from amenable.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of amenable.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term had already receded from use before Webster's 1913 compilation.
The gap here is not between common and legal meaning but between the obsolete form and its modern descendant. A researcher encountering amesnable in a source is reading amenable — the concept is continuous, but the spelling is period-specific and signals the era and character of the source.
Common Confusion
AMESNABLE vs. AMENABLE: These are not two different terms. Amesnable is the Law French orthographic predecessor to the modern amenable. The substantive legal content — susceptibility to jurisdiction, liability to answer, capacity to be brought before a court — is the same across both forms. Confusion arises when researchers treat amesnable as a distinct term with a narrower or different meaning than amenable, or when automated full-text searches for amenable fail to surface older sources using the amesnable spelling.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a spelling trap. Researchers working in early English legal sources — Year Books, Fitzherbert, Littleton, Kelway — will encounter amesnable where a modern source would say amenable. Full-text searches built around the modern spelling will miss these passages entirely.
The verb root amesner (to lead, bring, summon, carry away) appears in multiple distinct legal contexts in the same sources: leading an army (Littleton, sect. 153), driving away goods or chattels (Keilway, 81b), and summoning a party to appear (Theloall's Digest). This means that a single verb form in a Law French source may be doing the work of what modern law separates into concepts of service of process, distress, and military obligation. Researchers tracing the history of any of these doctrines should run searches on both amesner and amener as well as the adjectival amesnable.
Burrill's cross-reference to Fitzherbert's Justice (12b) is the primary definitional anchor in the historical record. Researchers who cannot locate the original Law French should treat Burrill's entry as the reliable secondary source for this term's scope.
Because amesnable is purely an archaic form with no surviving independent usage, there is no risk of the term carrying different meaning in different jurisdictions — but there is a periodization point: encountering this spelling confidently dates the source or the source's immediate antecedents to the Law French period of English legal writing, generally pre-seventeenth century.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the only major historical legal dictionary to provide a dedicated entry, and his treatment is brief but sufficient. He defines the term as "that which may be brought, led or carried," citing Fitzherbert's Justice (12b) and a Law French dictionary. He immediately cross-references the verb amesner and treats the two entries together, correctly signaling that the adjective is inseparable from its verbal root.
Burrill's entry for amesner expands the picture usefully. The three illustrative uses — leading an army (Littleton), driving away goods (Keilway), and summoning a party (Theloall) — demonstrate that the root verb covered a semantic range that modern law has since distributed across several distinct doctrines. Burrill does not editorialize on the relationship between amesnable and amenable, but the cross-reference structure implies it.
No entry appears in Black's Law Dictionary (any edition), Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Tomlin's Law Dictionary under this spelling. Those dictionaries subsumed the concept under amenable without noting the earlier form. This is a gap in the standard research dictionaries that Burrill's coverage partially fills.