Definition
En le per is a Law French phrase meaning "in the per," used in the old common law to classify writs of entry according to the degree of alienation or disseisin through which the claimant's title was said to have passed. The phrase appears most fully in the compound expressions en le per et cui (in the per and cui) and en le post (in the post), each designating a distinct stage in the graduated system of writs of entry.
Under this system, the writ of entry was tailored to the number of intermediate hands through which wrongful possession had passed since the original dispossession. A writ en le per alleged that the current occupant held through a single wrongdoer — the person who originally wronged the claimant. A writ en le per et cui alleged that possession had passed through one additional hand: the original wrongdoer and someone claiming under him. A writ en le post was used when possession had passed through so many hands that the specific chain could no longer be precisely stated, making a general allegation necessary.
Common Confusion
En le per, en le per et cui, and en le post are frequently treated as synonymous in passing references, but they are distinct writs corresponding to distinct procedural postures. A researcher finding one form in a historical record cannot assume the others would have been available or appropriate in the same circumstances. The three together form a graduated sequence; conflating them obscures the degree-of-alienation logic that the old writ system was built around.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a procedural vocabulary that was already archaic by the time most nineteenth-century legal dictionaries were compiled. Researchers working in early English common law records — particularly Year Books, plea rolls, and registers of writs — will encounter en le per and its companion phrases as technical markers identifying which form of writ of entry was pleaded. Getting the graduation wrong (confusing per for post, for instance) can misread the stage of litigation and the nature of the title dispute.
The Register of Original Writs (Registrum Omnium Brevium) is the essential primary source for understanding the formal distinctions. Reeves's History of English Law provides the doctrinal context for how the graduated writ system developed and eventually collapsed into the general writ en le post, which became the standard form as the strictness of the older pleading rules relaxed. Researchers should note that by the time of Blackstone and the later common law commentators, the distinction between the degrees had largely lost practical significance, and sources from that era may treat the older gradations cursorily or dismiss them as obsolete technicality.
Because the writ of entry itself was abolished in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and effectively superseded in practice even earlier, this term has no continuing operational life in modern law. It appears exclusively in historical legal materials. Any corpus search should be anchored to pre-nineteenth-century sources; later appearances are almost certainly doctrinal history or academic commentary rather than live pleading.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential framework: en le per, en le per et cui, and en le post as the three graduated forms, keyed to the Register of Original Writs and to Reeves's History of English Law. Burrill cross-references the fuller treatment under "In the per," where the Latin-language equivalents of these Law French phrases are addressed. This is a useful reminder that the Law French and Law Latin forms coexisted in the historical sources, and a researcher searching only one linguistic form may miss relevant records filed under the other.
Burrill does not elaborate on the doctrinal rationale for the degree system or on how courts interpreted the boundaries between per, per et cui, and post in contested cases. For that analysis, Reeves's History remains the most accessible secondary source, and Littleton's Tenures and Coke's commentary upon it provide the classical common law treatment of possessory actions more broadly.
No significant divergence among the historical dictionaries is present here because the term is narrow and technical enough that compilers generally deferred to the same small cluster of primary sources.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no application in American law. The writ of entry was received in some early American jurisdictions but was abolished by procedural reform well before the twentieth century. The graduated per/post distinction does not appear to have been systematically adopted even where the writ of entry itself was used in early American practice.