Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "undertaken" or "an undertaking." In historical legal usage, empris referred to an enterprise or endeavor — a matter taken in hand or assumed as an obligation. The term appears in medieval Anglo-Norman legal texts and records, where it carried the sense of a venture or proceeding that one had committed to pursue.
Common Confusion
Empris should not be confused with EMPRISONER (Law French: to imprison), which appears immediately after it in Burrill's arrangement. The two share a linguistic register and a dictionary page but are semantically unrelated. Empris derives from a root meaning to take or undertake; emprisoner relates to imprisonment and confinement.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering empris in medieval or early modern English legal manuscripts should treat it primarily as a term of Law French, the specialized juridical dialect derived from Norman French that dominated English legal writing from the Conquest through the early modern period. The term is unlikely to appear in post-seventeenth-century materials, and its presence in a document is itself a dating and provenance signal.
The word's proximity in Burrill's entry to EMPRISONER (to imprison) is a layout artifact, not a semantic connection. Do not conflate the two. A researcher scanning Burrill's columns could easily read the two as related terms when they are independent entries sharing only alphabetical proximity and Law French origin.
Because empris appears without elaboration in surviving legal dictionaries — Burrill cites only Kelham's glossary of Law French — the term left no developed doctrinal footprint. It does not correspond to a recognized cause of action, procedural form, or substantive legal category. Its research value is philological and contextual: it helps identify the register and period of a document, and may assist in translating or interpreting surrounding text.
Researchers working with Year Books, early plea rolls, or other Anglo-Norman legal materials should consult Kelham's Normand Dictionary (1779) as the primary glossary source Burrill himself references. For any term encountered in Law French sources, cross-referencing with Kelham and with Glanvill, Bracton, or Britton (depending on period) will generally yield better contextual grounding than later English-language dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is spare: "L. Fr. Undertaken. Kelham." This is the entirety of the surviving dictionary record for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill traces it to Kelham's glossary rather than to a primary legal text directly, which places empris one step removed from original source authority.
Britton — the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise cited in the adjacent EMPRISONER entry — does not appear to be Burrill's source for empris itself, suggesting the term's usage was not prominent enough in Britton or similar primary texts to warrant direct citation. Historical dictionaries offer nothing beyond this minimal record, and no elaboration of the term's technical or procedural significance survives in the standard reference works.
What the historical sources collectively confirm is that empris was recognized vocabulary in the Law French legal register, understood to mean an undertaking or enterprise, but never developed into a term of art with a precise legal definition or formal doctrinal application.