Definition
In old law French usage, *entendaunt* means attendant — one who attends upon, accompanies, or is in the service of another. The term appears in early Anglo-Norman legal texts and carries the general sense of a person connected to or dependent upon a principal figure, whether in a household, official, or feudal capacity.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will surface almost exclusively in early English legal manuscripts and Year Book materials written in Law French, particularly sources predating the gradual displacement of that language from English legal practice. Researchers encountering *entendaunt* in such contexts should treat it as a direct functional equivalent of the English "attendant" and read it accordingly — it carries no technical legal meaning distinct from that ordinary sense.
The principal research trap is misreading the term as a substantive legal category with defined rights or duties, when it operates more as a descriptive label drawn from ordinary Law French vocabulary. Because Law French legal terminology frequently imported words from conversational Old French without altering their meaning, *entendaunt* is one of those terms that the historical dictionaries acknowledge but do not elaborate upon, precisely because there is little technical content to elaborate.
Researchers working in corpus materials predating approximately 1400 should also be alert to variant spellings common in manuscript Law French: forms such as *entendant* or *atendaunt* may appear and refer to the same concept. Cross-referencing against the English term ATTENDANT when searching later materials will capture the same concept after the vocabulary shifted.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary entry of substance, identifying *entendaunt* as Law French derived from *entendre* and equating it with "attendant," with a single citation to Britton, folio 1b. Britton is a late thirteenth-century treatise on English law written in Law French, and its use of the term confirms the word's period of active legal currency. Burrill offers no further elaboration, which is itself informative: this is not a term that generated doctrinal complexity or required judicial definition. It is a vocabulary item, not a legal concept.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus provide entries for this term. Researchers should not interpret that silence as indicating the term is rare in primary sources — it simply did not attract the attention of later lexicographers who were cataloguing terms of art rather than ordinary Law French vocabulary that happened to appear in legal texts.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is English in origin and application, arising from the Anglo-Norman legal tradition. It has no recognized use in American legal sources.