Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning issue — that is, the offspring or descendants of a person. Used in medieval English legal texts to denote the children or lineal progeny of a party, particularly in contexts involving inheritance, land tenure, and conditions of grant dependent on the existence of heirs of the body.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in current general use; obsolete in standard English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act of generation." Marked as obsolete; the sole citation is Chaucer.
The Webster's definition captures the biological act, while the legal meaning in Britton and related sources refers to the product of that act — the children or issue themselves. The distinction matters: a condition in a grant "si engendrure" concerns whether offspring exist or come into existence, not the act of procreation as an abstract event.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is unlikely to appear in any post-medieval source and is almost exclusively confined to Law French texts and their translations from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Researchers encountering it will most often find it in editions of Britton, Bracton-era materials, or glossaries appended to Year Book collections.
The primary research trap is conflating engendrure with other inheritance-related terms of similar vintage. The term is functionally synonymous with issue and with the Latin proles in many contexts, but a given text may use them with slightly different shading — engendrure sometimes emphasizing the living offspring at a particular moment, rather than the abstract line of descent. Read the surrounding context carefully before treating these terms as interchangeable.
Because the term belongs to the Law French stratum of English legal vocabulary, researchers working in translated editions should check whether the translator rendered engendrure as "issue," "offspring," "progeny," or "children born of the body" — each rendering carries different implications in modern inheritance law analysis, and translator choices vary across editions of the same source.
No direct relevance to American or modern Commonwealth legal doctrine. Its value is purely historical and terminological: understanding what a medieval conveyance or statute meant when it conditioned an estate or right on the existence of engendrure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the Law Mind shelf sources, and it is spare: "L. Fr. [from engendrer] Issue. Britt. c. 77." The single citation to Britton (a late thirteenth-century English law treatise written in Law French) anchors the term firmly in that specific corpus. Burrill does not elaborate on how the term functioned within the Britton passage, which limits the entry's utility for anyone who needs to understand the legal operation of the word rather than simply its translation.
Webster's 1913, while not a legal source, corroborates the obsolescence of the term in general English and confirms the Chaucerian vintage — placing its active use squarely in the medieval period. The dictionary sources collectively agree that the term was not current even by the nineteenth century and had no living legal application by the time Burrill compiled his dictionary. Burrill's inclusion of it reflects the dictionary's function as a historical reference for practitioners and scholars encountering archaic pleadings and records, not as a term with ongoing doctrinal significance.
No other standard legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to carry an independent entry for this term.
Jurisdictional Note
Engendrure is a term of English legal history with no independent usage in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Its relevance is confined to the interpretation of medieval English legal texts.