BURGH ENGLOYS

Definition

An archaic Norman French form of the term Borough English. All three source dictionaries treat Burgh Engloys as a direct variant spelling and cross-reference Borough English without further elaboration. The term itself carries no independent legal content — it is a linguistic artifact of the period when Anglo-Norman French was the language of English legal records and pleading. For the substantive rule, see BOROUGH ENGLISH.

Common Confusion

Burgh Engloys, Borough English, and the Latin form Burgus Anglicus all refer to the same customary rule of inheritance. Researchers encountering any of these forms in historical sources should treat them as interchangeable. The variant spelling Burgh Engloys appears most often in Year Book materials and early plea rolls where Law French orthography was not standardized. Do not confuse the term with the general word "burgh," which in Scots and English municipal law simply denotes a borough or incorporated town and carries no inheritance meaning on its own.

Why It Matters in Research

This term functions almost exclusively as a finding aid problem rather than a substantive legal concept. Researchers working in medieval English legal records — particularly Year Books, plea rolls, and early common law treatises — will encounter multiple orthographic variants of the same underlying rule. Burrill cites Yearb. P. 1 Edw. III. 38 in his entry, which is the kind of primary source reference that Law Mind corpus researchers should follow through to the Borough English entry and its associated materials rather than treating Burgh Engloys as a terminus. The practical trap: full-text searches for "Borough English" will miss records using "Burgh Engloys" or "Burgus Anglicus." Any serious historical inquiry into the customary inheritance rule — particularly in manorial records or Year Book extracts — requires casting the search net across all variant forms. The Law French spelling conventions of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries were fluid, and a single copyist might render the same term differently across a single document. Burrill's entry is also notable for embedding two adjacent terms — Burgheristh and Burghmote — immediately after the Burgh Engloys cross-reference. Researchers browsing Burrill in sequence should be alert to this layout: the substantive content of those neighboring entries is distinct from anything related to the inheritance custom.

Historical Dictionary Support

All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Burrill — treat Burgh Engloys identically: as a bare cross-reference to Borough English with no independent definition. This unanimity is itself informative. It confirms that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, the Law French form was already understood as a defunct orthographic variant rather than a term of art with its own doctrinal content. None of the dictionaries offer comment on the historical usage context or the Year Book period in which the Law French form was current. Burrill's citation to Yearb. P. 1 Edw. III. 38 appears in the broader neighborhood of the entry rather than as a direct authority for Burgh Engloys specifically, and researchers should read it accordingly.

Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Borough English; Customary Tenure; Law French in English Legal Records.

Related Terms