Definition
An Anglo-French legal verb meaning to imprison or commit to prison. Used in early English legal texts to denote the act of placing a person in custody or confinement by authority of law. The term appears in Law French legal writing and carries the same operative meaning as the modern "to imprison." It is sometimes rendered as emprisoner in variant spelling.
Common Confusion
ENPRISONER and EMPRISONER are the same term in variant spelling, both derived from Law French. Burrill cross-references the two forms directly, treating them as interchangeable. Researchers encountering either form in a medieval or early modern English legal source should read them as equivalent. Neither form carries a distinct legal meaning from the other — the variation reflects orthographic inconsistency common in Law French sources rather than any substantive legal distinction.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear only in Law French legal texts, most notably in Britton, the late thirteenth-century English legal treatise composed in Anglo-French and attributed to John le Breton. Researchers working in that corpus or in early Year Book materials should recognize enprisoner as a functional verb equivalent to the modern "imprison" and not attempt to assign it a narrower or more technical meaning than that.
The primary research trap is treating the Law French form as carrying a specialized meaning distinct from simple imprisonment. It does not. The term is purely descriptive of the act of confinement and should not be confused with later technical vocabulary around commitment, detention, or incarceration, which carry their own distinct legal weight in modern doctrine.
A secondary trap is encountering enprouer or enprower — a separate Law French verb meaning to improve or make profitable — in proximity to enprisoner in the same source. Burrill lists them adjacently, and a researcher skimming the entry may conflate them. They are unrelated in meaning.
Researchers using Law Mind sources to trace the history of imprisonment as a legal sanction should treat enprisoner as an early evidentiary marker: its presence in Britton reflects the period when imprisonment was beginning to consolidate as a formal legal consequence rather than merely a pretrial holding measure in English law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole dictionary treatment of this term in the Law Mind corpus. The entry is minimal: Burrill defines it as Law French for "to imprison," cites Britton chapter 66, and cross-references emprisoner. No further elaboration is offered, and no other historical legal dictionaries in the corpus — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions — carry a dedicated entry for this form.
The absence from later dictionaries is itself informative. By the time Bouvier and Black's were compiled, Law French had receded from legal practice and writing, and archaic verb forms like enprisoner had no practical utility in American legal discourse. Their omission is not a gap in legal knowledge but a reflection of the term's temporal and jurisdictional limits: it belongs to medieval English legal French and does not migrate into the common law vocabulary that American legal dictionaries were built to serve.
Burrill, whose dictionary was oriented toward historical and comparative legal scholarship more than practitioner use, is the appropriate source for this term and captures it accurately.
Jurisdictional Note
Strictly historical English law. The term has no operative use in any modern jurisdiction. Its relevance is limited to research in medieval English legal sources, particularly Britton and contemporaneous Anglo-French legal writing.