Definition
An obsolete Law French term meaning to dry, or to dry up. In medieval English legal and administrative usage, enseccher appeared in records concerning the extraction or processing of natural materials — particularly in contexts involving the digging, drying, and carriage of commodities such as peat, turf, or similar substances. The term appears in variant spellings including ensercher, and its past participial form ensecchi (dried) is recorded in related documents. The plural form ensekchies also appears in period records.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter enseccher almost exclusively in medieval English legal records, particularly in plea rolls, writs, and administrative documents from the reign of Edward III (early to mid-fourteenth century). The term is a narrow technical descriptor tied to specific rights or operations involving the processing of dug materials, and it does not carry forward into later English common law vocabulary in any meaningful way.
The primary research trap is spelling variation. Burrill records at least three orthographic forms — enseccher, ensercher, ensekchies — and historical scribes working in Law French introduced further inconsistency. A researcher searching only one spelling in manuscript rolls or printed year book indices will miss related entries. When transcribing or indexing, treat all three forms as equivalent.
The temporal anchor is specific: the recorded usages cluster around Edward III's reign (1327–1377), with Burrill citing Michaelmas Term 7 Edward III and Trinity Term 5 Edward III. Researchers working outside this window in the medieval common law corpus are unlikely to encounter the term at all.
The phrase à fower, ensercher, & à carier — to dig, dry, and carry away — signals that enseccher was one element of a tripartite operational sequence recorded in grants, licenses, or pleadings governing resource extraction rights. Understanding the full phrase matters: enseccher describes the intermediate step between digging (fower) and carriage (carier), which may be relevant when interpreting what rights or obligations a particular document was conveying or limiting.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical shelf source to address this term, and its entry is brief. Burrill identifies the Law French root meaning (to dry or dry up), notes the variant spelling ensercher, quotes the operative phrase fower, ensercher, & à carier, and cites Michaelmas 7 Edward III as the primary source. Burrill also records the past participial form ensecchi and the plural ensekchies, with an attribution to Kelham — a reference to Robert Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), which served as a standard glossary of Law French terms and is itself a useful corroborating source for researchers working in this area.
No other historical legal dictionary in the standard shelf — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Bouvier — appears to carry this term, which underscores its extreme rarity and narrow contextual life. The absence from those sources is itself informative: enseccher never achieved the general legal currency that would have warranted inclusion in dictionaries aimed at practitioners or students of common law.
Kelham's treatment, cited by Burrill, likely provides the most granular linguistic support for researchers who need to confirm meaning in a manuscript context.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to medieval English legal records. It has no known application in Scottish, Irish, or continental legal traditions as a distinct legal term of art, and it did not survive into any modern common law jurisdiction.