Definition
An obsolete Law French adverb meaning "openly" or "plainly." Used in medieval legal pleading and procedure to describe acts done in a manifest, unconcealed manner — as opposed to covertly or by fraud. The term is a spelling variant of APERTMENT and carries identical meaning.
Common Confusion
The visual similarity between APARTEMENT and the modern English word "apartment" (a residential dwelling unit) creates a significant false-cognate risk. A researcher scanning an old text who encounters APARTEMENT may misread it as a reference to a room or tenement. It is not. The term is purely adverbial and has no connection to property or habitation law. See APERTMENT for the full entry on this term's legal use.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering APARTEMENT in historical legal manuscripts, Year Books, or early common law pleadings should treat it as a variant spelling of APERTMENT and not as a reference to a physical dwelling or residential unit. The orthographic variation is characteristic of Law French sources, where spelling was inconsistent across scribes and centuries. Burrill himself redirects to APERTMENT, signaling that APARTEMENT was already considered a secondary form even by mid-nineteenth-century lexicography. Researchers working in early plea rolls or abridgments should search under both spellings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only documented legal dictionary entry for this spelling, defining it tersely as "openly; plainly" and attributing the usage to Kelham's glossary of Norman French. Burrill adds nothing beyond the redirect to APERTMENT, indicating the term had no independent doctrinal life and was preserved only as a lexicographic cross-reference. No substantive disagreement or elaboration appears across the available shelf sources because no other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus includes a separate entry for this spelling variant.