Definition
A Law French phrase appearing in early English legal records, rendered by Burrill as meaning roughly "encroaches a horse" — that is, to ride or drive a horse forward and back, or to make it advance and retreat. The phrase appears in the context of describing physical actions, likely in the setting of a legal dispute or pleading where the movement or control of a horse was at issue.
The term has no continuing legal significance and functions today purely as a historical artifact of Law French legal terminology.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter ENCHAZ ET RECHAZ almost exclusively in early English Year Book materials and in treatises drawing on those sources. The Burrill citation to Plowden's Commentaries (Plowd. 94a) is the anchor point — Edmund Plowden's Commentaries and Reports (published 1571, 1578) are among the most authoritative of the early English case reporters, and that folio reference situates the term firmly in mid-sixteenth-century common law pleading.
The practical research trap here is the fragment: Burrill's entry is truncated ("If the —"), meaning the full context of the phrase's legal application is lost in the surviving dictionary text. Researchers who need the full passage must go directly to Plowden at folio 94a rather than relying on any secondary synthesis.
This term illustrates a broader challenge in Law French research: many phrases describe physical acts with precision that mattered to pleading — the exact nature of a wrongful act, a trespass, or a party's conduct could determine the form of action. A phrase describing the movement of a horse was not ornamental; it may have been operative language in a declaration or count.
ENCHAZ ET RECHAZ is not indexed in standard modern legal research tools and will not appear in electronic databases unless those databases have digitized Plowden directly. Researchers working on equine-related trespass or early tort pleading forms may find the Plowden passage substantively useful even if the term itself is obsolete.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source providing an entry for this term, and that entry is fragmentary. Burrill translates the phrase as "in-croaches a horse" — an archaic construction meaning to cause a horse to encroach or press forward — and cites Plowden 94a without completing the illustrative quotation.
No entry appears in Bouvier, Black (any edition), or Tomlin for this phrase, which reflects how narrowly specialized the term was even within Law French. Its survival in Burrill is likely owing to Burrill's more exhaustive treatment of Law French and Anglo-Norman terminology compared to contemporaneous American dictionaries.
The incompleteness of the Burrill entry is itself informative: it suggests the phrase was included for completeness of Law French coverage rather than because it retained any practical legal significance by the mid-nineteenth century when Burrill compiled his dictionary.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is of English common law origin exclusively. It has no documented reception into American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions as operative legal language.
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