Definition
An obsolete Law French term meaning to inform or to give information, used in early English legal proceedings to describe the act of bringing a matter to the attention of a court or official authority. The term appears in archaic procedural contexts and is the root from which the English legal concept of the informer — a person who formally reports a violation or offense — derives. In its historical usage, enformer did not describe a person but the act itself: the giving of information that initiated or advanced a legal proceeding.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not attested as a modern English word. "Inform" survives as the ordinary English verb meaning to tell or notify.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as a distinct entry. Webster's 1913 recognizes "informer" as a person who informs against another, particularly one who brings a penal action to recover a statutory penalty.
The gap here is between the verbal act (enformer as the doing of informing) and the substantive English legal tradition that shifted focus to the person performing that act. Researchers who encounter enformer in historical texts should not read it as referring to an individual actor but to the procedural step of lodging information.
Common Confusion
Enformer is frequently read as a variant spelling of informer (the person), but the Law French usage is verbal and procedural rather than nominal. An enformer in a Britton passage describes what happens — the act of informing — not who does it. Collapsing the two obscures the procedural structure of early English criminal and quasi-criminal proceedings, where the act of bringing information was a formal step with its own legal significance independent of the identity of the actor.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in Law French sources from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly in Britton, the Anglo-Norman legal treatise attributed to the reign of Edward I. Researchers working with early plea rolls, crown pleas, or commentaries on Britton will encounter enformer in contexts describing how proceedings were initiated against defendants.
The key navigational point: enformer belongs to a cluster of Law French procedural terms — including enditer, presenter, and accuser — that describe overlapping but technically distinct stages of early English criminal process. Conflating them produces misreadings of how a matter came before a court. Enformer specifically connotes the informational or accusatory input, not the formal indictment (enditement) that might follow.
Researchers tracing the history of the common informer system in English law should use enformer as a linguistic and conceptual anchor for the earlier, pre-statutory practice of private information-giving, before Parliament created formalized qui tam actions. The later statutory informer is a legal descendant of this earlier procedural act, but the institutional structure changed dramatically.
Because this term appears in a narrow band of sources, corpus searches should include variant spellings: enformer, enformed, enformes, and the anglicized informer in comparative context. A researcher who searches only for informer will miss the Law French antecedent and its procedural nuance.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry in minimal form: "L. Fr. To inform. Britt. c. 84, 96." This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Law French terms — bare translation with a source citation, no elaboration. The citation to Britton (chapters 84 and 96) is the primary archival anchor for this term.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the standard shelf — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Bouvier, not Black's early editions — carry a separate entry for enformer. This absence reflects the term's absorption into the English informer tradition by the time those dictionaries were compiled. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as the terminus for dictionary support and go directly to Britton for context.
What the historical sources collectively miss: none of them address the procedural relationship between enformer and the formal steps that followed in early English criminal process, nor do they situate the term within the broader Law French vocabulary of accusation and initiation of proceedings. A researcher relying solely on Burrill would know what the word means in translation but not what it does in a legal text.
Jurisdictional Note
Enformer is a term of English legal history with no direct American or civil law counterpart. Its relevance is confined to research in English common law history, particularly the period of Anglo-Norman legal practice from the late thirteenth through the fourteenth century.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia: Informers and Common Informers