Definition
In old English pleading, the plaintiff's formal count or declaration — the opening statement of the plaintiff's claim before the court. The entencion set out the plaintiff's case and served the function of what later procedure would recognize as the declaration or complaint: a structured articulation of the grievance and the basis for relief sought.
The term belongs to the vocabulary of early common law pleading, when Law French and Latinized forms dominated court records and procedural documents. It appears primarily in historical sources treating the pleading practice of medieval English courts.
Common Confusion
ENTENCION and ENTENTE appear in proximity in Burrill and may be encountered in close succession in historical sources. Burrill treats them as related but distinct headwords. Researchers should not assume the two terms are interchangeable without verifying usage in the specific source being examined.
ENTENCION should also be distinguished from INTENTIO in its Roman and canon law senses. While ENTENCION derives from INTENTIO, the Latin term carried a more formal and technically defined role in Roman civil procedure — specifically the part of the formula in which the plaintiff's claim was stated — that does not map perfectly onto the English common law usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering ENTENCION in manuscript records, plea rolls, or early legal treatises should treat it as a functional equivalent to "declaration" in the classical common law sense — not the modern civil complaint, but the formal oral or written statement of the plaintiff's case that opened proceedings. The term is essentially extinct in active legal usage and will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern sources, particularly materials from the 13th and 14th centuries.
The principal trap is conflation with the closely related term ENTENTE (also Law French), which Burrill flags as a cross-reference. Researchers should check both headwords when working through historical dictionaries, as coverage is uneven across sources and some dictionaries index one but not the other.
Because the term derives from the Latin INTENTIO — the formal allegation in Roman and civil law procedure — researchers working across common law and civil law traditions in historical sources may encounter the Latin and Law French forms used interchangeably or with subtly different shades of meaning depending on the source's jurisdictional context. The Latin INTENTIO carried broader procedural weight in Roman law and canon law than the narrower pleading function ENTENCION occupied in English practice.
Corpus researchers should note that the term will not appear in modern statutory compilations, restatements, or case law. Its research utility is almost entirely confined to the historical legal corpus: early Year Books, Britton, Bracton-era materials, and commentaries written before pleading practice was regularized by the Hilary Rules (1834) and later displaced by code pleading in the 19th century.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in complete agreement: ENTENCION means the plaintiff's count or declaration in old English law. There is no meaningful divergence among Black's (1st), Black's (2nd), Bouvier's, and Burrill's on this point.
Burrill provides the most useful entry by identifying the Law French origin (from Latin intentio), cross-referencing ENTENTE, and citing Britton c. 92 — placing the term in a traceable historical source. Britton, the late 13th-century legal treatise written in Law French and attributed to the reign of Edward I, is one of the primary texts in which this vocabulary appears in context.
Black's and Bouvier's are more compressed, offering the definition without the etymological anchor or the source citation. Neither flags the relationship to INTENTIO, which is a meaningful omission for researchers trying to understand how the term functions across the Latin-Law French boundary in early materials.
What the historical dictionaries collectively do not address is the procedural mechanics: whether the entencion was oral or written at various stages of early pleading practice, how it related to the writ that initiated the action, or how it evolved as pleading formalized. Researchers needing that level of procedural detail should consult Holdsworth's History of English Law or Maitland's writings on early common law procedure rather than relying on dictionary entries alone.