Definition
The official act of recording or entering a document, instrument, or recognizance upon the rolls of a court of record or other authorized public registry. Enrolment gave legal effect or public notice to the instrument enrolled, and in some contexts was a precondition to the document's operation at law.
In English practice, enrolment was performed on the rolls maintained by the courts of Chancery, King's Bench, Common Pleas, or Exchequer, or by the clerk of the peace on the records of the quarter sessions. Instruments subject to enrolment included recognizances, deeds of bargain and sale, and similar instruments of legal consequence.
In American law, the term appears most prominently in the context of merchant shipping, where "enrolment" and "registration" carried distinct statutory meanings under federal law — enrolment applying generally to vessels engaged in the coasting trade, and registration to vessels engaged in foreign commerce.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An alternative form of "enrollment" — the act of registering or entering a person's name in a list, course, or institution.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of enrolling; a register; a record.
The common use of the word today almost exclusively refers to a person joining something — a school, a program, a health plan. The legal meaning is fundamentally different in character: it refers to the act of recording an instrument or document upon an official roll, conferring legal status or public notice on the instrument itself, not on a person. A researcher encountering "enrolment" in historical legal sources should not read it through the modern lens of personal registration.
Common Confusion
Enrolment is frequently conflated with registration in historical research, but the two terms carried technically distinct meanings in American maritime law. Under the Revised Statutes, vessels in the domestic coasting trade were enrolled; vessels in foreign commerce were registered. The documents issued differed accordingly. Treating the two as synonyms in merchant shipping research can produce material error. Outside the maritime context, the distinction collapses and the terms are often used interchangeably in general legal usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Several navigational issues arise for researchers working with this term:
Spelling variation is the first trap. English legal sources use "enrolment" (one "l"); American sources increasingly adopted "enrollment" (two "l"s) through the nineteenth century. Both spellings appear in historical American federal documents, and corpus searches should account for both forms.
The maritime distinction matters acutely in shipping law research. The Revised Statutes title 50 established a formal distinction between enrolled vessels and registered vessels that governed the documentary evidence of a vessel's nationality and trade privileges. Researchers treating these as equivalent will misread the regulatory framework and misidentify applicable statutory provisions.
In English chancery research, enrolment of a deed of bargain and sale was a statutory requirement under the Statute of Enrollments (1536), which required such deeds to be enrolled within six months to be effective at law. A deed not enrolled operated only in equity. This creates a source problem: an unenrolled bargain-and-sale deed may appear in equity records but not in the legal rolls, and researchers consulting only one set of records may reach erroneous conclusions about the state of title.
The rolls themselves — Chancery rolls, King's Bench rolls, plea rolls — are distinct physical and archival records. Knowing which court's rolls a particular instrument would have been enrolled upon is necessary to locate the document. Bouvier's enumeration of the courts of enrolment is a starting point, but the specific roll type (e.g., close rolls, patent rolls, recovery rolls) may require further archival navigation.
In American state practice, enrolment of statutes — the official engrossing and certifying of enacted legislation — carries a separate and distinct meaning unrelated to the private instrument context. Researchers should not conflate enrolled bills (legislative) with enrolled deeds or instruments (conveyancing).
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's treatment is brief but structurally sound. It correctly identifies enrolment as an English law concept tied to the court rolls and names the relevant courts and instruments. The cross-reference to Jacob's Law Dictionary signals that Bouvier is working from an established English law tradition rather than generating an independent American definition — appropriate given that enrolment in its technical conveyancing sense was an English doctrine with limited direct American inheritance.
Bouvier's truncated citation to the Revised Statutes title 50 and 21 Stat. is the most practically significant part of the entry for American researchers. The federal merchant shipping enrollment and registration system was a major area of statutory law, and the distinction between the two terms had real legal consequences for vessel owners and for the admissibility of ship's papers as evidence of nationality and trading rights.
What Bouvier does not address: the enrolled bill doctrine in American constitutional law (the principle that an enrolled act is conclusive evidence of its own enactment), the use of enrolment in pension and military records, or the procedural mechanics of Chancery enrolment practice under the Statute of Enrollments. Researchers working in any of these areas will need to supplement Bouvier substantially.
Jurisdictional Note
The English law of enrolment, including the Statute of Enrollments requirement for deeds of bargain and sale, did not transplant uniformly into American states. Some states adopted recording acts that functioned analogously; others developed independent deed registration systems. Federal enrolment law under the shipping statutes was nationally uniform, but its administration was through local customs districts, and local practice records may vary.