Definition
An Anglo-Norman law French term meaning "left out" or "omitted." Used in early English legal proceedings to describe something excluded or passed over — most commonly in the context of formal pleadings or writs where a required element had been left out. The related participial form, ENTERLESSANT, means "leaving out" or "in the act of omitting."
Common Confusion
ENTERLESSE should not be confused with general terms of error or defect in pleading. The term describes a specific act or condition of omission — something that should have appeared in a legal instrument or record but did not — rather than a broader category of formal irregularity.
Why It Matters in Research
ENTERLESSE is a narrow archaic term encountered almost exclusively in early English Year Book materials and commentaries on medieval statutes, particularly discussions of the Statute of Additions (1 Hen. V, c. 5), which required that defendants in personal actions be identified by their estate, degree, or occupation. Omissions of such required additions gave rise to technical pleading challenges, and enterlesse appears in this context to describe what had been left out of a writ or indictment.
Researchers working in Year Book sources, Coke's Institutes, or early common law pleading materials will encounter this term primarily as a term of art in discussions of formal defects. Its appearance signals that a document is being scrutinized for completeness under the strict requirements of early common law pleading — a context in which omissions could be fatal to a writ or indictment. A researcher seeing enterlesse in a Year Book entry should immediately look to what element of identification or description was alleged to be missing, and whether that omission was treated as curable or fatal.
The participial form ENTERLESSANT appears in Year Book entries in the context of active pleading argument — counsel asserting that the opposing party "is leaving out" a required element — which reflects the oral and dynamic character of Year Book reporting. Neither form survives into modern legal usage.
Researchers should also note that Law French terms of this type are frequently mistranscribed or inconsistently spelled across manuscript traditions and early printed editions of the Year Books. Variant spellings may appear without cross-reference in historical indexes.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core record for this term, defining enterlesse as "left out; omitted" with reference to the Statute of Additions and Coke's Second Institute at page 665, and enterlessant as "leaving out" with a citation to the Year Books, Pasch. 7 Hen. VI, fol. 12. These citations are specific and consistent with the term's expected habitat in early fifteenth-century pleading law.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to carry this term, which reflects its extreme technical narrowness and the general decline of Law French as a working legal vocabulary after the seventeenth century. Burrill's entry is brief but sufficient: the term did not require elaboration because its application was confined to a single, well-understood procedural context.
What historical dictionaries do not provide is any sustained analysis of how omissions under the Statute of Additions were actually adjudicated — whether enterlesse in a writ was treated as a ground for abatement, demurrer, or amendment. That procedural dimension must be pursued through Coke's Institutes and the Year Book materials themselves.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs entirely to the early English common law tradition and has no recognized equivalent or usage in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It is a research term only, relevant to historical English legal sources.