Definition
An obsolete Law French verb meaning to assign — that is, to transfer, set over, or designate a right, interest, or property to another. The term appears in early Anglo-Norman legal records and pleadings as a variant form of the verb later rendered in English as "to assign." It carried no technical meaning distinct from assignment generally; it is a linguistic artifact rather than a substantive legal concept.
Common Confusion
ASSENER should not be confused with a distinct legal doctrine or procedure simply because it appears as a standalone headword in Burrill. Its only function in historical legal writing was verbal — to describe the act of assigning — and it carries no independent doctrinal content. Researchers should also distinguish it from ASSENER in any non-legal sense; there is no legal term of art here beyond its identity as a Law French form of "assign."
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering ASSENER in primary sources — particularly medieval and early modern English legal records, Year Books, or plea rolls — should treat it as a functional equivalent of "to assign" or "to transfer," not as a term of art with independent doctrinal weight. The primary trap is mistaking a spelling or scribal variant for a distinct legal concept. Anglo-Norman legal French was not standardized, and the same operative word could appear across sources as assener, assigner, assignier, or assignee (used verbally). When indexing or searching historical corpora, failure to account for these orthographic variants will produce incomplete results. The term connects directly to the broader doctrine of assignment, which itself evolved considerably from the medieval period through the development of modern contract and property law. A researcher tracking assignment in early sources must cast a wide net across spelling variants. Burrill's cross-reference to ASSIGNER is the correct follow-on entry for substantive doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary exhausts the available historical dictionary support for this term. Burrill defines ASSENER tersely — "L. Fr. To assign" — with attribution to Kelham's Norman-French dictionary and a cross-reference to ASSIGNER. This entry is purely lexicographic rather than doctrinal. Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779) is the anticipated underlying source for the linguistic identification; Burrill treats it as authoritative for Anglo-Norman vocabulary without elaboration. No other major historical law dictionaries — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Black's early editions — independently carry ASSENER as a headword, which confirms the term's status as a variant form rather than an independent legal term. The substantive law of assignment must be traced through ASSIGNER and its cognates across those sources.