Definition
To write down in brief or abbreviated form; to reduce to a schedule or short written summary. The term appears in Law French legal usage to describe the act of condensing or formally recording something in abbreviated written form — functionally, the drafting of a written memorandum or schedule that captures essential terms or facts in concise notation.
The concept is closely related to imbreviare, the Latin cognate from which it derives its practical meaning, and refers specifically to the act of reduction to writing rather than the substance of what is written.
Common Confusion
ENBREVER, IMBREVIARE, and BREVE form a cluster of related terms that are easy to conflate. ENBREVER is the act (to reduce to writing); IMBREVIARE is the Latin equivalent of the same act; BREVE is the resulting document — a writ or short written instrument. Confusing the act with the instrument is the most common error when working across Latin and Law French sources that may use these terms interchangeably or inconsistently.
Why It Matters in Research
ENBREVER is archaic even by the standards of historical legal dictionaries. Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in early Anglo-Norman legal sources and in works drawing on Britton, the 13th-century English legal treatise written in Law French. The term does not appear in modern case law or statutes.
The key navigational point: when you encounter ENBREVER in a historical source, the operative question is not what was written but that something was reduced to a formal written schedule — the act of memorialization itself carried legal significance in early English practice, where oral proceedings were the norm and reduction to writing was a deliberate, consequential step.
Researchers working with medieval English legal records, plea rolls, or early treatises should treat ENBREVER as a marker of formal written reduction — look for the resulting document (the breve or schedule) as the primary artifact. The term points you toward a process, not a product category.
Cross-reference to IMBREVIARE and BREVE in any corpus search will surface the broader network of related terms. Historical dictionaries index these inconsistently: Burrill explicitly directs readers from ENBREVER to IMBREVIARE, while Black's (both editions) treats each entry independently without systematic cross-referencing.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in agreement on the core definition: to write down in short, to abbreviate, or to put into a schedule. The agreement is nearly verbatim across Black's 1st edition, Black's 2nd edition, and Burrill — a sign that each subsequent compiler drew from the same upstream source, almost certainly Britton (cited as "Britt. c. 1" in Burrill and "Britt. ec 1" in Black's 2nd edition).
Burrill adds the instructive cross-reference "See Imbreviare," which Black's omits. This is the only meaningful divergence among the three, and Burrill's is the more useful entry for that reason. Researchers should note that the shared citation to Britton places this term squarely in 13th-century English legal usage under the Law French that dominated formal legal writing after the Norman Conquest.
None of the historical dictionaries situate the term within procedural context — they define the act but do not explain when or why enbreviation was legally required or consequential. For that context, researchers must go upstream to the primary sources.