Definition
An Anglo-Norman (Law French) term meaning apprentice, used in early English legal contexts to denote a person learning the law or a trade under formal arrangement. In its specifically legal application, the term referred to apprentices of the king's courts — junior practitioners or law students who attended court proceedings as part of their legal education, occupying a recognized status distinct from fully admitted attorneys or serjeants. The phrase *un apprentiz de la court le roy* (an apprentice of the king's court) signals a formal institutional role, not merely informal training.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An apprentice is a person who is learning a trade or craft from a skilled employer, typically under a formal agreement.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "One who is bound by indentures or by legal agreement to serve a mechanic, or other person, for a certain time, with a view to learn the art, or trade, in which his master is bound to instruct him."
The gap between the common and legal meaning here is primarily one of professional context. While the common definition anchors apprenticeship in manual trades, *apprentiz* in medieval English legal usage attached specifically to the legal profession and the royal court system. The term carried a technical institutional meaning — a recognized rank within the hierarchy of legal practitioners — rather than simply describing an informal learner.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal sources, Year Books, or materials from the medieval and early modern common law period will encounter *apprentiz* as a term of professional rank rather than a generic descriptor. Several navigational points deserve attention.
First, the term predates the modern vocabulary of legal education. The organized Inns of Court system gradually formalized what *apprentiz* described loosely in earlier usage. Researchers tracing the history of the English bar, legal education, or court procedure in pre-modern sources should treat *apprentiz* as evidence of a structured — if informal by later standards — system of professional formation attached to the royal courts.
Second, the pairing of *apprentiz* with *attourne* (attorney) in Burrill's citation is analytically significant. It suggests that at certain periods these were distinct roles — the apprentice being the learner, the attorney being the acting agent — but the line between them was not fixed, and the same individual might occupy both statuses in different contexts. Conflating the two in historical sources is an easy mistake.
Third, the term is Law French in origin and appears in sources where Latin, Law French, and Middle English coexist. Researchers must attend to the linguistic register of the source when interpreting *apprentiz*: its meaning in a Year Book gloss may differ subtly from its meaning in a later summary or digest.
Fourth, Burrill's gloss — "to prepare" — hints at the verbal sense of the root, which may appear in derivative forms in legal texts. Researchers should not limit searches to the noun form alone.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source bearing on this term, and its entry is brief but precise. Burrill identifies *apprentiz* as Law French, equates it with the English *apprentice*, supplies the key institutional phrase (*un apprentiz de la court le roy, et attourne*), attributes it to Kelham's glossary of Law French, and adds the verbal gloss "to prepare."
The Kelham attribution is important context. Robert Kelham's *A Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779) was a significant reference for Law French terminology in English legal sources, and Burrill's reliance on it here indicates the term's primary documentary life was in the Year Book and related medieval legal literature rather than in later common law practice.
What historical dictionaries collectively miss is any extended treatment of the institutional structure implied by the term — specifically, how *apprentiz de la court* related to the emerging Inns of Court, or how the apprentice's status translated into procedural standing in court. That institutional history requires recourse to legal history scholarship rather than the dictionaries themselves.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is effectively confined to the English common law tradition and its historical antecedents. It has no operative meaning in American, Scottish, or civilian legal systems, and does not appear as a live term in any modern jurisdiction's law. Its relevance is exclusively historical and documentary.