Definition
An archaic legal term denoting a fee or profit taken or received. In feudal and early English legal usage, apprendre referred to the right to take or receive some form of income, toll, or profit — typically as an incident of a tenure, office, or legal privilege. The term is essentially synonymous with the concept of a perquisite or emolument arising from a legal entitlement rather than from direct labor or contract.
Common Confusion
Apprendre should not be confused with apprender or apprendre in its ordinary French sense (to learn, to teach), which has no connection to the legal meaning. The legal term derives from the sense of "taking" or "receiving" — closer to the Latin apprehendere in the sense of laying hold of a thing — rather than from any pedagogical or cognitive sense. Researchers translating or transcribing early Anglo-French legal documents should be careful not to render apprendre as a verb of learning when it appears in a context involving fees, tolls, or profits of office.
Why It Matters in Research
Apprendre is a term of historical significance only. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal texts, Year Books, feudal land records, and early treatises on tenure and office. It does not appear in modern statutory or case law as a living term of art.
The primary research trap is failing to recognize apprendre as a variant spelling or Anglicized rendering of the Anglo-French and Latin legal vocabulary that pervades medieval English legal sources. Researchers working in early chancery records, manorial rolls, or treatises on copyhold and customary tenure should be alert to the term appearing without definition, with the assumption that the reader's Latin and Law French would supply the meaning. Cowell's Interpreter — the source cited by both Black's editions — is the essential reference point for confirming period usage.
Because apprendre describes a right to receive profit rather than a specific type of property or obligation, it functions less as a term of legal art with formal elements and more as a descriptive label. This means it will rarely appear as the operative term in a legal instrument; instead, it characterizes the nature of a right already established by other language. Researchers should look to surrounding context — particularly any named tenure, office, or custom — to understand what specific profit or fee the term encompasses in a given document.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary editions offer nearly identical, minimal entries: "A fee or profit taken or received," attributed to Cowell. The reliance on John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607) in both editions signals that apprendre had already passed out of active legal usage well before the nineteenth century and that Black's was recording it as a historical curiosity rather than as a working term of American or English law.
The brevity of both entries is itself informative. Neither edition attempts to distinguish subtypes, identify jurisdictional application, or connect the term to any contemporary doctrine. The second edition offers no substantive elaboration over the first. This uniformity suggests the editors found no evolution in meaning to report — the term arrived in the common law lexicon from Anglo-French usage and departed without generating significant jurisprudential development.
Cowell's original treatment, though not reproduced at length in Black's, places apprendre within the vocabulary of feudal incident and office-holding — the same conceptual neighborhood as appurtenance, perquisite, and emolument. Researchers requiring fuller treatment should consult Cowell directly rather than relying on the compressed Black's entries.