Definition
An archaic legal term, now obsolete in English legal writing, denoting a minor — that is, a person who has not yet attained the age of legal majority. ENFANT is simply the old French-derived form of INFANT as it appeared in early English legal records and reports. It carries no distinct legal meaning of its own; wherever it appears in historical sources, it is functionally equivalent to INFANT.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In contemporary English, "enfant" is not a standard word; it survives only as a borrowing from French, where it means "child." It appears occasionally in English in set phrases such as "enfant terrible."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not treat "enfant" as an English word. It was understood in educated usage as French for "child" or "infant."
The gap worth noting: In early English legal practice, Law French persisted long after the Norman Conquest as the formal language of the courts. ENFANT in legal records is not a stylistic borrowing — it is Law French being used as the operative legal term. A researcher who encounters it in a Year Book, plea roll, or early report should read it exactly as they would read INFANT in a later common-law source.
Common Confusion
ENFANT should not be confused with a term of art distinct from INFANT. They are the same concept in different linguistic registers. The only confusion that arises is temporal: a researcher unfamiliar with Law French may treat ENFANT as a narrower or different category from INFANT, or may fail to retrieve relevant material when searching under only one spelling. Both forms appear across the transition period of English legal records, and neither has priority in meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a finding aid problem. Researchers working in pre-modern English legal sources — Year Books, early nominate reports (such as Leonard's Reports, from which Burrill draws his cite to 3 Leon. 113), plea rolls, and Chancery records — will encounter ENFANT where later sources would write INFANT. The practical consequence is a search and recognition issue, not a substantive legal issue.
Three traps to watch for:
First, Law French was not used uniformly across all courts or all periods. Common Pleas and King's Bench records employed it heavily through the seventeenth century; equity sources and Parliamentary records have their own patterns. The appearance of ENFANT in a given source is a signal about that source's age and court of origin.
Second, early nominate reporters did not always standardize spelling. ENFANT, ENFAUNT, and INFANT may all appear within the same volume. Index searches in digitized versions of early reports may not normalize these variants.
Third, because ENFANT has no life in modern legal writing, it will not appear in secondary literature unless the author is specifically discussing Law French or glossing an early source. Researchers tracing the historical development of the law of infancy, guardian and ward, or contractual incapacity should expect to shift vocabulary as they move backward in time through the corpus.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's treatment is minimal but accurate: "The old form of Infant." The single citation to 3 Leon. 113 (Leonard's Reports, a late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century collection) is illustrative rather than exhaustive. Burrill's entry does what a working lawyer's dictionary of his era needed to do — it bridges the vocabulary gap for a practitioner who encountered the term in an older authority and needed to know its modern equivalent.
No substantive divergence exists among historical legal dictionaries on this point. The term is too vestigial to generate disagreement. What historical dictionaries do not provide is guidance on the broader Law French context — the fact that ENFANT is one of dozens of French-rooted terms that traveled through the English legal system and gradually gave way to anglicized equivalents over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: INFANT; LAW FRENCH