Definition
An obsolete Law French term meaning to accrue or to increase. Encountered in older legal texts and records to describe the arising or growing of a right, debt, interest, or obligation — the process by which something comes into being or augments over time.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary value of this entry is recognition, not application. A researcher working through medieval or early modern English legal records, plea rolls, or Year Books may encounter *encrecer* and need to confirm its meaning before proceeding. The term carries no modern doctrinal weight; it is a linguistic artifact of the Law French period of English legal writing, roughly the 13th through 17th centuries.
The functional concepts behind *encrecer* — accrual of a cause of action, accretion of interest, increment of a debt — survive in modern law under entirely different vocabulary. When tracing the historical development of accrual doctrine or the calculation of damages over time, encountering *encrecer* in a primary source signals that the surrounding text is addressing one of those underlying concepts. Context will almost always clarify which.
Researchers should be alert to variant spellings. Law French orthography was inconsistent, and the same term may appear as *encrecer*, *encrescer*, or in Latinized forms reflecting the same root. Kelham's *Norman-French Dictionary* is the standard supporting reference for such variants, and Burrill cites it directly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary offers a spare but accurate entry: "L. Fr. To accrue; to increase. Kelham." This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Law French terms — definitional without elaboration, sourced to Kelham as the specialist authority on Norman French legal vocabulary. There is no divergence among historical sources worth noting because the term appears in no other major law dictionary of record at the level of detail that would produce competing definitions. The term's meaning was settled and narrow.
What historical dictionaries collectively miss is any practical guidance on where *encrecer* most commonly appeared in the records. The term surfaces chiefly in contexts involving the running of obligations — interest accruing on a debt, damages increasing over a period, or rights ripening. A researcher who understands this practical deployment will navigate primary sources more efficiently than one who relies on the bare definition alone.