Definition
An Old French (Law French) term meaning "to speak together" or "to confer among themselves." In medieval English legal practice, *enparler* described two distinct procedural acts: (1) the deliberation of a jury withdrawing to consider its verdict, and (2) a party's request for leave to confer or consult before proceeding further in a matter — the act later formalized in English procedure as imparling or emparlance.
The term is the Law French root of the anglicized forms "imparl" and "emparlance," which carried forward into common-law pleading practice as recognized procedural concepts.
Common Confusion
ENPARLER / IMPARL / EMPARLANCE: These three forms describe the same underlying concept at different stages of linguistic translation. *Enparler* is the Law French source term. *Imparl* is the anglicized verb. *Emparlance* (or *imparlance*) is the anglicized noun denoting the formal leave granted to a party to confer before pleading. A researcher encountering *enparler* in Year Book sources or Britton is seeing the procedural act in its earliest documentary form; the same concept in later common-law pleading materials will appear as imparlance. Conflating the jury-deliberation sense with the party-consultation sense is an easy error — both uses appear in medieval sources under the same term.
Why It Matters in Research
*Enparler* appears almost exclusively in Law French sources predating the anglicization of common-law procedure. Researchers will encounter it in Year Books, in Britton, and in treatises that quote or gloss those sources directly. The term will not appear in post-medieval pleading manuals or practice guides under this spelling; the concept migrates entirely into *imparlance* by the time English-language legal literature becomes standard.
Two research traps deserve attention. First, the term carries two functionally distinct meanings in the original sources — jury deliberation and party consultation — and those meanings diverged sharply as English procedure developed. Imparlance in later common-law pleading refers almost exclusively to the party-consultation sense; the jury-deliberation sense was absorbed into other vocabulary. A researcher reading Britton's description of jurors going aside "pur enparler" should not assume that usage maps cleanly onto later imparlance doctrine.
Second, the Year Book citation in Burrill ("Ove v're cong' nous voulons enparler") captures the formulaic request a party made to the court for leave to confer — a phrase that became a set-piece of pleading ritual. Recognizing this formula in Year Book transcriptions helps identify imparlance requests that may not be labeled as such by modern editors or indexers.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary dictionary source for this term, and its entry is compact but precise. Burrill correctly identifies both the jury-deliberation usage (citing Britton, chapter 52) and the party-consultation usage (citing the Year Books, Pasch. 7 Henry VI). The Latin French quotations he preserves are genuinely instructive: the Britton passage makes clear that jury withdrawal was understood as a communicative act — jurors going aside "by themselves, to imparl or talk together" — rather than merely a physical separation. The Year Book formula shows the party-consultation sense as a spoken, courtroom request for leave.
No other source dictionary in the current corpus covers this term. Historical dictionaries generally treat *enparler* as a pass-through entry, defining it by reference to its anglicized descendants rather than analyzing it independently. The term's significance is as a documentary artifact of Law French procedure, not as a living term of art.
Jurisdictional Note
*Enparler* is a term of English medieval legal practice and appears in sources specific to that tradition. It has no independent life in American legal sources. American materials addressing imparlance doctrine reference the anglicized form only.