Definition
An Anglo-French legal term from early English law meaning to steal or take by theft. Appearing in Law French pleading and statutory contexts, *embler* functioned as the operative verb for theft — roughly equivalent to the modern "to steal" — and appears in record sources from the Norman and early Plantagenet periods. The related form *emble* (past tense or participial) means "stolen," used to describe property that had been taken by theft. The term was not a term of art for a specific grade of theft but served as general vocabulary for felonious taking in Law French legal instruments.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current entry. The word is archaic and no longer appears in general English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. By the nineteenth century the term had passed entirely out of living usage, surviving only in legal and historical texts.
*Editorial note:* Because *embler* carries no modern common meaning, there is no risk of confusion between lay and legal usage. The researcher's challenge is the reverse: encountering the term in a historical source and having no familiar reference point at all. The word's nearest functional equivalent in modern legal English is simply "to steal," but that translation erases the Law French register of the original, which may matter for dating and interpreting a document.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English rolls, plea records, or Norman-period statutes will encounter *embler* and its variants in untranslated or partially translated Law French passages. Several navigational points are worth flagging:
**Variant forms and spelling instability.** Law French orthography was not standardized. Researchers should anticipate forms such as *emble*, *embles*, *emblez*, *embla*, and conjugated variants. A search limited to a single spelling will miss occurrences. The Burrill entry alone surfaces *emblea*, *emble*, and *emblers* as distinct attestations.
**Contextual range.** The term appears in records ranging from land tenure disputes (where a lessee's act of sowing land is described using *emblea* in a context that may shade toward wrongful taking of a harvest) to straightforward theft indictments (*si le chival fuit emble hors de sa garde* — if the horse was stolen out of his custody) to parliamentary rolls addressing theft from the populace (*emblers des gentz*). This range means the term can surface across several different areas of the Law Mind corpus: property law, criminal law, and parliamentary history.
**The lessee-sowing context.** Littleton's *Tenures*, section 68, uses *emblea* in a land law context — the lessee who sows the land. This is a specialized usage that researchers in early landlord-tenant or emblements doctrine will need to track carefully. It connects *embler* terminologically to the doctrine of **emblements** (the right of a tenant to harvest crops sown before the tenancy's termination), even though the causal connection between the two terms is debated. Do not assume *embler* in a land context always means criminal theft; the sowing usage may carry a distinct legal sense.
**Parliament Roll attestation.** The citation to *Rot. Parl.* 21 Edw. III grounds the term in a datable primary source (1347), useful for researchers triangulating the term's active currency in official record language.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole source dictionary for this entry and provides the primary attestation record. His entry is philological rather than doctrinal: he supplies illustrative quotations from Littleton, Britton, the Laws of William the Conqueror, and the Rolls of Parliament, but does not develop a legal definition beyond identifying the term's meaning as "to steal."
What Burrill does well here is preserve the evidentiary trail — multiple distinct source texts across a range of dates — that confirms *embler* was genuine working vocabulary across different genres of Law French legal writing, not an isolated archaism. What the entry does not provide is any doctrinal analysis: no discussion of how *embler* related to the formal elements of larceny or felony, no comparison to synonymous terms like *larrecin* (larceny) or *roberie* (robbery), and no guidance on whether the term carried specific legal weight distinct from those alternatives.
Researchers needing fuller doctrinal context for early English theft vocabulary will need to consult Britton and Bracton directly, as Burrill's entry functions as a glossary note rather than a substantive legal analysis.
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Jurisdictional Note
*Embler* is a term of English Law French and is relevant exclusively to English legal history and the common law tradition derived from it. It has no independent presence in civil law jurisdictions or in American legal sources after the colonial period.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Larceny
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Emblements
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Law French: Vocabulary and Usage in English Legal Records
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