Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "to claim," used in early English common law pleading and procedure. It appears most specifically in the context of a party claiming a freehold interest — that is, asserting entitlement to a free tenement in land. Burrill records a secondary usage, *en clamaunt fraunk tenement*, meaning "claiming the freehold," and a further distinct phrase, *en vie* (in life; alive), though the latter is a separate Law French construction that appears incidentally in the same sources.
As a term of art, *enclamer* functioned as procedural vocabulary in real actions — the old common law forms of action used to recover land — where formal language of claim and counter-claim carried legal weight. The word itself is the verb; the derived noun form would be the claimant or the act of claiming.
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Common Language
This term has no current common English usage and is not found in Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 as an English word. It is pure Law French legal jargon. COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted.
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Why It Matters in Research
ENCLAMER is a navigational term — researchers will encounter it in transcribed or translated Year Books, in early treatises on real property, and in digests of medieval English pleading practice. Its significance is almost entirely confined to the period before the abolition of the old real actions (formally completed in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and the Common Law Procedure Act 1852, which swept away most real and mixed actions). Researchers working in:
- **Year Book records and Bracton-era pleading** will find *enclamer* embedded in Law French formulae where modern translations may render it simply as "claim" or "assert title," obscuring the original term.
- **Britton** is the primary source cited. Britton (c. 1290) is an Anglo-Norman legal treatise written in Law French, attributed to a close follower of Edward I's legal reforms. Chapters 42 and 70, as cited by Burrill, deal with real actions and freehold claims. Researchers consulting Britton should note that chapter numbering varies across editions and manuscripts; confirm the edition in use before cross-referencing Burrill's citations.
- **Freehold and seisin doctrine**: *Enclamer fraunk tenement* (claiming the freehold) connects directly to the body of doctrine around seisin — the concept of possessory right in land that underpins much of medieval English land law. A researcher following *enclamer* will quickly need vocabulary for seisin, disseisin, and the various real actions (novel disseisin, mort d'ancestor, etc.).
- **Transcription traps**: In manuscript sources, *enclamer* may appear as *enclaimer*, *enclamare*, or in Latinized form. The prefix *en-* in Law French often signals a verbal construction ("to put into" or "to carry out"), so related constructions may appear with different roots but parallel grammar.
American researchers are unlikely to encounter this term outside of historical scholarship on English common law origins. It has no American statutory or case law presence.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source in the Law Mind corpus for this term, and its entry is sparse but precise. Burrill correctly identifies *enclamer* as Law French, provides its operative meaning ("to claim"), supplies the specific compound phrase *en clamaunt fraunk tenement* with reference to Britton, and notes the secondary phrase *en vie* (in life; alive) — though that latter note likely reflects a separate headword or sub-entry in Burrill rather than a meaning of *enclamer* itself.
Neither Jacob's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, nor Black's Law Dictionary (early editions) carry this term as a primary entry, which reflects how thoroughly the real actions vocabulary fell out of active use after the nineteenth-century procedural reforms. Burrill, published in 1860, was written with conscious attention to historical and Law French terminology, making it the most reliable shelf source for terms of this vintage.
No treatise in the Law Mind corpus offers a competing or expanded definition. Researchers needing fuller treatment should consult specialized works on Year Book language and Law French legal vocabulary, such as Maitland's introductions to Year Book editions published by the Selden Society.
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Jurisdictional Note
ENCLAMER is an English common law term with no independent development in American, Scottish, or civil law jurisdictions. It is relevant only in the context of English legal history and the medieval real actions that were exported in attenuated form to the early American colonies but effectively extinct in practice before American law developed its own professional literature.
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