Definition
A Law French term meaning "besides" or "furthermore." Used in early English legal texts to introduce an additional point, charge, or matter beyond what has already been stated. Functions as a connective word in pleading and narrative legal documents, signaling that what follows supplements rather than replaces what precedes it.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal manuscripts, Year Books, or early plea rolls will encounter encoires as a structural marker in the text — not a substantive legal concept in itself, but a word that shapes how the surrounding material should be read. Misreading or overlooking it can cause a researcher to treat a supplementary allegation as a standalone claim, or to miss that a pleader was adding a further ground to an argument already made.
The term belongs to the broader vocabulary of Law French, the Anglo-Norman legal dialect that dominated English court practice from the Norman Conquest through roughly the seventeenth century. Law French persisted in legal records long after it ceased to be a living language, becoming a formulaic professional shorthand. Terms like encoires appear without translation in early printed abridgments and manuscript sources because they were assumed knowledge among practitioners of the period.
Because encoires is a function word rather than a term of art, it does not appear as a defined concept in most later legal dictionaries. Researchers who encounter it in a source and attempt to locate its meaning through nineteenth-century or modern legal reference works will generally come up empty. Burrill's is one of the few dictionaries that captures this category of Law French vocabulary at all, making it a valuable first stop for this class of term.
The word appears in the same textual environment as related Law French connectives and procedural terms. Understanding its function is essential for accurate transcription and interpretation of early legal records, particularly in digitized corpus searches where automated transcription may misread or omit the term entirely.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among standard historical legal dictionaries, defining encoires simply as "Besides" and attributing the gloss to Kelham — a reference to Robert Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), one of the principal reference works for Law French vocabulary.
Burrill's entry is brief to the point of being skeletal, but this is appropriate: the word is a connective, and extended definition would overstate its legal significance. What Burrill's does usefully accomplish is to confirm the term's presence in the legal lexicon and to chain it to Kelham's earlier scholarship, giving researchers a path to an older and more linguistically focused source.
No substantive divergence exists among sources because encoires is not treated elsewhere in the standard historical legal dictionary tradition. Tomlins, Bouvier, and Black do not carry the term. This absence is itself informative: it confirms that encoires was never a term of legal art with doctrine attached to it, only a linguistic relic of Law French pleading style.
Researchers should note that Burrill's surrounding entries — encombrer, enconter, and related forms — suggest the dictionary was working through a cluster of Law French terms alphabetically, and that these neighboring entries may provide useful context for documents in which encoires appears.