Definition
An Old Law French verb meaning to bury, or to inter a deceased person. The term appears in early English legal sources in connection with burial rights, mortuary customs, and the obligations or privileges attached to interment. The past participial form, ensevely, carries the meaning "buried." The term has no modern legal survival and is encountered exclusively in medieval and early common law texts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter ensevilir and its participial form ensevely almost exclusively in Britton, the late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise that summarizes English law in the reign of Edward I. The citations in Burrill point to specific chapters of Britton (c. 11, c. 74, c. 75, c. 91, c. 47), and researchers working with that text should recognize the term as a routine verb of interment rather than a term of art carrying independent legal weight.
The significance of burial terminology in this period should not be underestimated. Rights of burial, mortuary fees, and the duties of the church with respect to interment were live legal and ecclesiastical disputes in medieval England. Whether a person was ensevely in consecrated ground, and by whose authority, could affect inheritance, the payment of mortuaries to the parish priest, and even questions touching excommunication or outlawry. The term itself is not a legal concept with elements or a formal test, but it flags a legal context — interment and its attendant rights — that carries substantive legal consequence in the sources where it appears.
Researchers using Law French sources should also note the ordinary hazard of variant spelling. Medieval scribal practice was inconsistent, and ensevelir, ensevely, ensevelis, and similar forms may all appear across manuscripts and printed editions of the same text.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this term and provides a concise entry identifying the Law French origin, the Latin root (sepelire, to bury), the English gloss, and the Britton citations. The entry is functional rather than analytical: Burrill records meaning and source location without elaborating on the legal context in which burial language mattered.
No other major historical legal dictionaries — not Tomlin's, not Bouvier's, not Black's early editions — appear to carry this term as a standalone entry, which is consistent with its narrow textual footprint. Its absence from common-law abridgments and treatises outside the Anglo-Norman tradition reflects the fact that ensevilir did not develop into a term of art carrying forward into later English or American legal usage.
The Latin root noted by Burrill (sepelire) connects the term to the broader Roman and ecclesiastical vocabulary of burial, though the Law French form arrived through Norman rather than direct classical transmission.