Definition
A Law French term meaning "as much" or "so much." Used in early common law pleading and legal writing as a particle of comparison or equivalence, typically to signal that one legal condition, obligation, or quantity corresponds to another. Functioned as a modifier within compound legal phrases rather than as a standalone legal concept.
Closely associated with the related Law French term AUTER (also rendered AUTRE), meaning "another" or "other," which appears in a range of compound legal terms still occasionally encountered in historical sources.
Common Confusion
AUTANT should not be mistaken for AUTER or AUTRE. While all three terms descend from the same Law French lexical field, AUTER and AUTRE bear the weight of numerous substantive compound legal terms. AUTANT is a comparative particle; AUTER/AUTRE mean "another" or "other" and generate an extensive family of doctrine-carrying phrases. Burrill places them in adjacent entries precisely because the proximity of these terms in legal manuscripts created opportunities for conflation.
Why It Matters in Research
AUTANT is rarely encountered as a standalone term in primary sources. Its primary research value is as a component of compound Law French expressions and as a signal that the surrounding text is working within the Law French tradition of early English common law. Researchers who encounter it in medieval plea rolls, Year Books, or early treatises should treat it as a connective or comparative particle rather than a term carrying independent legal weight.
The greater navigational risk is confusion with the far more consequential family of terms built on AUTER/AUTRE. Compound terms such as AUTER ACTION PENDANT (another action pending), AUTER DROIT (another's right), AUTER FOY (another's faith), and AUTER VIE (another's life) appear throughout property law, pleading doctrine, and estates doctrine and carry substantive legal meaning. Encountering AUTANT in a source should prompt the researcher to verify whether the intended term is actually one of the AUTER/AUTRE compounds, since manuscript copying and early print variation could introduce confusion between these closely related forms.
Burrill cross-references AUTER and AUTRE directly from AUTANT, making plain that the terms travel together in the Law French lexicon. Researchers working with Glanvill, Bracton, the older Abridgments, or any pre-modern English legal source should maintain familiarity with the full cluster.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term. Burrill treats AUTANT briefly — "as much; so much" — and pivots immediately to AUTER and AUTRE as the more legally productive related terms, citing Littleton's Tenures (sections 38 and 39) for the use of AUTERS and AUTER in context.
Burrill's entry confirms the pattern typical of Law French particles: the term itself is definitionally thin, but its value lies in anchoring a network of compound terms. No other shelf source in the present corpus develops AUTANT further, and no extended doctrinal treatment of the term as an independent legal concept has been identified. Its treatment in historical dictionaries is consistently brief and cross-referential, suggesting that even contemporaneous legal lexicographers understood it as infrastructural vocabulary rather than substantive doctrine.