Definition
An interval of time. Drawn from Law French, *entreval* denotes a gap or space between two points in time — a period of intermission or separation between events or acts. The term appears in early English legal usage primarily in procedural and pleading contexts where the lapse of time between actions or occurrences carried legal significance.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *entreval* will find it almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources composed in or heavily influenced by Law French. Its appearance is rare and largely confined to treatise-era materials. Because the term carries no technical weight in modern legal doctrine — having been wholly displaced by ordinary English words such as "interval," "period," or "interregnum" — its significance is purely interpretive: understanding what it meant in context rather than applying it as a term of art.
The primary trap for researchers is mistaking its obsolescence for obscurity of meaning. The word means simply "interval." The difficulty lies not in translation but in determining what legal consequence the interval in question was intended to produce — whether it spoke to laches, to the interruption of a continuing right, to the lapse of a writ, or to some other time-sensitive doctrine. Context in the surrounding text must supply that answer; *entreval* itself supplies only the temporal gap.
Researchers working in Britton or similar Anglo-Norman legal sources should be alert to the orthographic instability common to Law French: variant spellings are plausible, and the word may not always be indexed consistently across older transcriptions and editions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the complete record here: "*L. Fr. An interval. Apres long entreval.* Britt. c. 111." The citation is to Britton, the late thirteenth-century treatise on English law written in Anglo-Norman French and attributed, though not with certainty, to John le Breton. Burrill offers no further elaboration, which is itself informative — the term apparently required no extended treatment because its meaning was considered self-evident and its usage narrow.
No independent entry appears in standard competitors such as Bouvier, Black's early editions, or Tomlin. The absence confirms that *entreval* never achieved the currency needed to anchor a doctrine or generate litigation over its meaning. It is a working vocabulary word of the Law French period, not a term of art.