Definition
In older Anglo-Norman and Law French legal usage, an enchaser is one who chases, drives, or compels — specifically, a lord or party who pursues or exerts pressure to extract more from a tenant or subject than is rightfully due. The term derives from the Law French "enchaser," meaning to chase or hunt, and appears in feudal tenure contexts where a lord's conduct toward a tenant could cross from lawful enforcement into wrongful compulsion or overreaching.
The term is narrow, archaic, and confined almost entirely to feudal land tenure discussions. It is not a term of art in modern law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who enchases — that is, one who performs the craft of enchasing (setting gems or ornamenting metal by engraving or embossing).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who enchases; defined in the craft or decorative arts sense.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is complete. In ordinary English, an enchaser is a metalworker or jeweler. In Law French legal usage, the same word refers to a feudal actor who drives or compels a tenant — a meaning rooted in the hunting metaphor of pursuit and pressure, entirely unrelated to decorative craftsmanship. A researcher encountering this term in a legal source must not import the artisan meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear, if at all, only in sources dealing with feudal tenure, fealty obligations, and the law of distress or overreaching by lords. The Burrill entry is fragmentary — the surviving text breaks off mid-illustration, referencing a tenant holding by fealty and a hawk — suggesting the full discussion concerned a lord who exacts more than his due from a tenant holding by serjeanty or symbolic tenure.
Researchers working in early English land law, particularly materials on villeinage, copyhold, fealty, and the obligations running between lord and tenant, should treat enchaser as a contextual marker pointing toward wrongful distress or excessive demand. The term is unlikely to appear in American legal sources at any period; it belongs to the English feudal vocabulary transmitted through Law French.
The fragmented condition of the Burrill entry is itself a research caution: the source text appears to have been garbled or incompletely transcribed, and any reconstruction of the full legal meaning requires cross-reference to primary Law French glossaries, particularly Kelham's Law French Dictionary, which Burrill himself cites.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical legal dictionary source for this term, and its entry is unfortunately truncated. What survives indicates: (1) the word is Law French in origin; (2) it carries the meanings "to chase," "to hunt," "to drive," and "to compel"; and (3) Burrill cites Kelham's Law French Dictionary as authority. The illustrative passage — a lord and a tenant holding by fealty and a hawk — points toward serjeanty tenure and the law governing what a lord may lawfully demand, suggesting enchaser describes a lord who overreaches in enforcing tenure obligations.
No other historical legal dictionary in the standard shelf — Bouvier, Black, Tomlin, Jacob — appears to carry this term independently, which underscores its narrow and archaic character. Researchers should not expect to find it glossed in American legal dictionaries of any era.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no modern jurisdictional application. Its relevance is confined to English feudal law prior to the abolition of feudal tenures, and it does not appear to have been transplanted into American, Scottish, or colonial legal usage in any recoverable form.