Definition
In historical legal usage, *enlarger* is the Law French infinitive meaning to enlarge, expand, or make more comprehensive. As encountered in medieval and early modern legal texts, the term functions as a verb of action rather than a noun, describing the act of broadening a legal right, grant, or physical thing such as a road or way. Two specific applications appear in the sources: expanding the scope of a gift or conveyance (*enlarger le don*), and the physical widening of a right of way (*chemyn enlargy*). The term is not a discrete legal concept with formal elements but rather a functional word embedded in Law French legal expression.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Any device that makes something bigger, or makes it appear bigger; specifically, an optical device used to make enlarged prints from a photographic negative; also, one who enlarges.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One that enlarges.
The common English noun "enlarger" refers almost exclusively to a person or device that increases physical size. The legal usage is structurally different: in Law French sources, *enlarger* is a verb infinitive, not a noun, and its subjects are legal instruments — grants, gifts, and easements — not physical objects or persons performing a mechanical action.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *enlarger* in primary sources should be alert to its grammatical context. In Law French texts, the word will typically appear as part of a phrase (*puit home enlarger le don*) meaning "a man may enlarge the gift," and should be read as expressing permissible expansion of a prior conveyance — a concept with practical significance in the law of property, particularly regarding gifts, grants, and easements. The related concept of enlarging an estate — converting a base fee or life estate into a fee simple — is a distinct but connected doctrine found in later English property law and may appear in sources that do not use the Law French form.
Researchers working with easement law should be aware that *chemyn enlargy* (an enlarged or widened way) signals a contested area: the permissible scope of easements, and whether a grantor could broaden a right of way after original grant, was litigated in English courts over centuries. The Law French phrasing in Britton points to early iterations of that question.
The term does not appear to have survived into modern legal English as a technical term of art. Researchers will not find "enlarger" as a defined concept in modern statutes, rules, or cases. Its relevance is confined to the interpretation of historical sources, particularly those drawing on Britton and related Anglo-Norman legal texts.
Note also that Rapalje & Lawrence's entry in the source material provided is for *Englesherie*, not *Enlarger* — a reminder that historical dictionaries organized by approximate spelling or alphabetical proximity can place unrelated terms in close physical proximity, and that page-based corpus searches should account for this.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive entry, tracing *enlarger* to Britton (c. 63 and c. 39) and offering two illustrative phrases. Burrill correctly identifies the dual application to rights and material objects, which is the essential distinction a researcher needs: the term covers both abstract legal expansion (broadening a gift or grant) and concrete physical expansion (widening a road). Rapalje & Lawrence do not appear to have a dedicated entry for *enlarger* in the material available; the adjacent entry for *Englesherie* is unrelated. No significant divergence between the sources exists because only one source addresses the term directly. Historical dictionaries that postdate the Law French period will not contain this term in its legal sense, as it did not carry forward into modern legal vocabulary.