Definition
In Law French, *enclorer* means to enclose — to shut in or shut up. The term appears in early Anglo-Norman legal texts to describe the act of enclosing land or confining something within a boundary. Its participial form, *enclos*, means enclosed, shut in, or shut up.
The term is not a term of art with an independent legal doctrine attached to it. It functions instead as a descriptive verb in medieval legal pleading and treatise language, used where modern English would simply say "to enclose" or "enclosed." Its significance lies almost entirely in its appearance in early legal sources, particularly Britton, where the act of enclosing land carried legal consequences related to common rights, waste, and landholding.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *enclorer* are almost certainly working in pre-modern English legal sources written in Law French. The term itself signals that the passage concerns enclosure of land — a subject of enormous legal and social importance in medieval and early modern England — but the word should not be confused with the elaborate statutory enclosure framework that developed later. When *enclorer* appears in sources like Britton, it is describing a physical act of enclosing in the feudal property context, not the Parliamentary enclosure movement of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
The key navigational trap: a researcher following the concept of enclosure across time will find the word *enclorer* giving way to "enclose" in Law French–influenced English, and then to entirely different statutory vocabulary as the enclosure movement developed its own procedural and legislative apparatus. *Enclorer* belongs to the earliest stratum of that history and should not be read backward through later frameworks.
Researchers should also be alert to the distinction between enclosing land (removing it from common use or fencing a boundary) and confining a person or animal. The Britton references cited by Burrill appear in chapters addressing landholding and related obligations, which suggests the land-enclosure sense is primary here, though the word's literal meaning — to shut in or shut up — could extend to either context.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole source entry here. His treatment is spare: a definition ("to enclose"), attribution to Britton chapters 61 and 33, and the participial form *enclos*. Burrill offers no doctrinal elaboration, which is itself informative — the term had no technical legal meaning beyond its plain descriptive function and was recorded primarily to help nineteenth-century lawyers decode Law French texts.
Historical dictionaries covering Law French more broadly (such as Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language*, not in the current source set) would be the natural complement for researchers needing fuller linguistic context. What Burrill does not provide — and what no standard legal dictionary of his era needed to provide — is any account of what legal consequences flowed from the act of enclosing, because those consequences were governed by substantive doctrines of common right, waste, and manorial custom, not by the word itself.
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Jurisdictional Note
*Enclorer* is a term of English Law French and is relevant only to the historical common law of England. It has no independent life in American, Scottish, or other legal traditions.
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