Definition
In old Anglo-French legal usage, to accuse or charge a person with an offense. Derived from the Law French, it carries the sense of laying blame or criminal responsibility upon someone. The related participial form, encoupe, means "accused" — that is, a person who has been charged or against whom an accusation has been made.
The term belongs to the vocabulary of early English criminal procedure, where Law French served as the operative language of pleading and court record. It does not persist in modern legal usage, having been displaced by the plain English equivalents "accuse," "charge," and "indict."
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal records — particularly plea rolls, year books, and treatises from the Norman and early common law periods — will encounter this term and its derivatives in their Latin or Law French forms. Recognizing encouper and encoupe is essential to correctly parsing accusations and the procedural status of defendants in these sources.
The key research trap is conflating the accused party (the "encoupe") with formally indicted or convicted persons. In early criminal procedure, being encoupe — charged or accused — did not carry the procedural weight of a modern indictment and certainly did not imply a finding of guilt. Researchers should be cautious about reading modern accusatorial or evidentiary implications into the term's appearance in historical records.
Burrill's citation to Britton (Britt. c. 4, 110) points researchers toward one of the foundational early English legal treatises written in Law French, composed circa 1290 and attributed to John le Breton. Britton is a primary source for Law French criminal procedure terminology, and its usage of encoupe confirms the term's role in describing the accused party at an early stage of proceedings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive treatment of this term among the standard historical law dictionaries. His entry is spare but precise: he identifies the Law French origin, connects it to the Latin inculpare (to blame, to charge), and supplies the participial form encoupe with the translation "accused," citing Britton.
No equivalent entry appears in Black's early editions, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Jacob's Law Dictionary, reflecting the term's status as archaic even by the nineteenth century. Burrill's inclusion of it is characteristic of his broader project of recovering Norman and early common law vocabulary that had already passed out of active use by his era.
The Latin root inculpare is itself instructive for corpus researchers: terms built on the same root (inculpatory, culpable, mea culpa) share the core sense of fault-attribution, which may help orient researchers encountering encouper in manuscript or printed sources for the first time.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the English common law tradition and its Law French inheritance. It has no counterpart in Scottish, civilian, or American legal usage and does not appear in equity or chancery sources. Researchers working in Irish or colonial records derived from English practice may occasionally encounter it in very early materials.