Definition
En arere is a Law French phrase meaning "in time past" or "in arrears" — referring to something that is behind, overdue, or owed from a prior period. It appears in historical legal texts to denote obligations, payments, or conditions that have fallen into a past-due state, or simply to mark that an event or status belongs to a former time. The phrase carries both a temporal sense (referring to past time generally) and a practical sense (identifying debts or duties that have gone unpaid or unperformed).
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Arrear" (the anglicized descendant of this phrase) means a state of being behind in the discharge of obligations, particularly financial ones; commonly used in the plural, "arrears," to describe overdue payments.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Arrear" — that which is behind in payment, or which remains unpaid and overdue; used especially in the phrase "in arrears."
The legal term en arere is the Law French source from which the modern English "arrears" derives. Researchers encountering en arere in historical statutes or treatises should understand it as the archaic form of a concept still very much alive in modern landlord-tenant, family law, and debt collection contexts. The phrase's temporal scope in older texts is sometimes broader than the modern "arrears," occasionally denoting past time generally rather than a specific overdue obligation.
Common Confusion
En arere is sometimes loosely grouped with the phrase en auter droit (in another's right), which appears immediately adjacent in Burrill's entry. These are entirely distinct concepts: en arere concerns time and overdue obligations, while en auter droit concerns the capacity in which a person holds rights or property on behalf of another. Their proximity in older dictionaries is purely alphabetical.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal sources — particularly statutes, writs, and chancery documents — will encounter en arere as the standard Law French expression for what modern sources call "arrears." The Statute of Jewry (Statutum de Judaismo, 1275), cited in Burrill, uses the term in the context of debt regulation, making it relevant to historical research on credit, usury law, and the legal treatment of Jewish creditors in medieval England. Coke's Second Institute (2 Inst. 506), cited across all three source dictionaries, is the primary English common law authority glossing this term.
Because the anglicized form "arrears" is so familiar to modern readers, the Law French form en arere is sometimes overlooked or misread in manuscript and printed sources. Researchers should recognize variant spellings — en arrere, en arier, en arreare — as equivalent forms reflecting inconsistent orthography in Law French texts. The phrase does not appear in post-17th-century legal usage as a live term; it was fully displaced by the anglicized vocabulary of debt law before the modern period.
Corpus connections: Researchers tracing the development of arrears doctrine in landlord-tenant law or judgment debt contexts should use en arere as a gateway term for medieval and early modern materials, then transition to "arrears" for sources from the 17th century onward.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core gloss — "in time past" — and all three cite 2 Inst. 506 as the authority. Burrill adds the Statute of Jewry citation, which is the more specific and historically informative reference, grounding the term in an actual statutory context rather than merely a commentator's gloss. Neither Black's edition develops the term beyond its brief definition, reflecting its character as archaic Law French vocabulary rather than a contested legal concept.
None of the historical dictionaries distinguishes between the temporal sense (past time generally) and the arrears sense (overdue obligations specifically), though the latter is the sense most frequently encountered in the primary sources they cite. Researchers should be aware that the term's meaning in any given document will depend on context.
Jurisdictional Note
En arere as a live legal phrase is confined to English and Anglo-American historical sources. It has no contemporary jurisdictional application. Modern arrears doctrine varies significantly by subject matter — rent arrears, child support arrears, tax arrears — and researchers should transition to jurisdiction-specific modern vocabulary once past the early modern period.