Definition
To water cattle; to provide livestock with water. The term appears in early Anglo-Norman legal usage as a verb describing the act of giving water to animals, particularly in the context of common rights and pasture obligations. It does not survive as a living term in modern legal practice and is encountered almost exclusively in archaic or historical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational landmark rather than an operative legal concept. A researcher encountering enbeverer in a primary source is almost certainly working in early English common law materials — likely pre-1400 manorial law, treatises on common of pasture, or records touching on agricultural tenancies and their associated obligations. The term signals proximity to related archaic rights vocabulary: estovers, turbary, piscary, and common of pasture. If enbeverer appears in a document, the surrounding context likely concerns the scope of a tenant's or commoner's rights over land, including what uses were permitted and whether watering of animals was among them. No modern case law employs this term. Researchers should treat any appearance of it as a textual marker of very early sources and look to Britt. (Britton, the late-thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise) and comparable manorial sources for interpretive context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry in the Law Mind corpus, defining the term economically as "L. Fr. To water, (as cattle)" with a single citation to Britton, chapter 61. Britton is an Anglo-Norman treatise attributed to the late thirteenth century and written as if in the voice of Edward I; it is one of the foundational early English legal texts alongside Bracton and Fleta. The citation anchors enbeverer firmly in that early common law stratum. Burrill offers no expansion on legal consequences or procedural context, which is consistent with the term's character as a functional descriptor rather than a term of art with formal legal elements. No other historical dictionary in the standard shelf — not Bouvier, not Black's, not Tomlin — appears to carry this entry, making Burrill the primary reference point. The absence from later dictionaries confirms the term's obsolescence well before the nineteenth century.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to early English common law and has no known independent development in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It should not be expected to appear in any American legal source.