Definition
To enroll; to enter or write a name, record, or document upon an official roll. The term appears in Anglo-Norman legal texts and refers to the formal act of recording on a roll maintained by a court officer or royal official. Most commonly encountered in historical sources referencing the coroner's roll or fugitive rolls, where names were formally committed to record as part of an established legal procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
ENROULER is a term of Anglo-Norman (Law French) origin and will not appear in modern legal materials. Researchers encounter it exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources — Year Books, Britton, Fleta, and similar texts — where Law French was the working language of the courts. Its significance lies in what it signals: a formal, official act of enrollment that carried legal consequences. Being enrolled on the coroner's roll or a fugitive roll was not a ministerial formality; it was a step in a legal process with real effects on status, rights, and liability.
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal sources should be alert to the distinction between enrouler and cognate terms of similar appearance. The root roule (roll) connects this term to a broad family of record-keeping concepts — enrolment of deeds, court rolls, pipe rolls, plea rolls — and confusion between these can distort the meaning of a passage. When Britton references enroulement on the coroner's roll, the context is criminal procedure and the recording of persons who have fled accusation, not civil record-keeping.
The two-roll requirement referenced in Britton (c. 26) — that the names of fugitives be enrolled in two rolls — reflects a standard redundancy practice in medieval record-keeping designed to prevent loss or falsification. This detail can be relevant when researchers are trying to reconstruct whether a historical enrollment was procedurally complete.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary treatment available in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill correctly identifies the Law French construction (en + roule) and supplies two illustrative quotations from Britton: one establishing enrollment on the coroner's roll as a recognized procedure, and one specifying the dual-roll requirement for recording fugitives. These citations to Britton (c. 1 and c. 26) are the primary anchors for understanding the term in practice.
No other historical source in the corpus treats ENROULER directly. Researchers seeking broader context should consult the primary text of Britton itself, as well as Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, which addresses coroner procedure and fugitive recording in the same period. The term's absence from later legal dictionaries — including Cowell, Tomlin, and Black's — reflects the natural obsolescence of Law French terminology as English displaced French in legal proceedings, a transition substantially complete by the late seventeenth century.
Burrill does not address the legal consequences of enrollment, the officer responsible for maintaining the roll, or procedural requirements beyond the two-roll rule for fugitives. These gaps are characteristic of dictionary treatment of archaic Law French terms, which tend to receive translational rather than analytical entries.
Jurisdictional Note
ENROULER is specific to the medieval English legal tradition. It has no operative meaning in any modern jurisdiction. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or continental sources from the same period should not assume identical usage, as administrative roll-keeping practices varied across legal systems even where Law French vocabulary was shared.