Definition
To shut in or confine within a boundary. In legal usage, the term carries two related but distinct applications:
1. To confine or sequester, as applied to a jury — to place jurors in a room apart from outside contact during deliberation or trial proceedings.
2. To surround land with a physical barrier — to fence or bound a tract of land so as to mark it off from surrounding ground. The product of this act is an inclosure: land enclosed by an actual fence or boundary.
Anderson's also notes that "inclose" and "include" share a common derivation, both carrying the sense of confining within. The distinction is contextual: "inclose" typically implies a physical act (fencing land, shutting in persons), while "include" operates as a term of logical or definitional scope.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An alternative form of "enclose" — to surround, shut in, or place something within another container or boundary.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To surround or confine on all sides; also, to put within a case or envelope; as, to inclose a letter or a bank note.
The common and legal meanings are close but not identical. In ordinary usage, "inclose" and "enclose" are interchangeable variants with no functional distinction. In legal contexts — particularly historical land law and procedure — "inclose" often carries technical weight. Applied to land, it signals a legally cognizable act of enclosure that can trigger property rights, common-law duties, or trespass liability. Applied to a jury, it describes a formal procedural step with distinct consequences for the integrity of the proceeding. Researchers should not treat the terms as freely substitutable when interpreting historical legal instruments.
Common Confusion
INCLOSE / ENCLOSE / INCLUDE: Anderson's expressly flags that "inclose" and "include" share the same derivation and one common signification — to confine within. In non-legal writing they can shade into one another. In legal instruments, however, the distinction matters: "inclose" almost always refers to a physical act (surrounding land, sequestering persons), while "include" performs a definitional or aggregating function in statutes and contracts. Confusing the two in reading older deeds or wills can materially alter the meaning of a testamentary direction or conveyance.
Why It Matters in Research
This term operates on two tracks in the Law Mind corpus — property law and procedure — and researchers working in either area will encounter it differently.
On the property side, "inclose" is the operative verb behind the doctrine of inclosure. In English and early American land law, the act of inclosing common or open land was legally significant: it transformed the character of the land, could extinguish common rights, and raised questions of trespass and adverse possession. A deed, will, or statute directing that land be "inclosed" should be read with attention to what that act accomplished legally, not merely physically. Anderson's truncated illustration — a testator directing executors to "inclose with an iron fence" three parcels of ground — is a useful reminder that the word appears in instruments where the legal consequences of the inclosing act may be the central interpretive question.
On the procedural side, "to inclose a jury" appears in Scotch practice sources and signals sequestration — the formal isolation of jurors. Researchers working with Scottish legal materials or early American practice that borrowed from Scottish sources should not conflate this with modern American jury sequestration doctrine, which developed along a different path.
Because "inclose" is often an alternative spelling of "enclose," searches in historical digitized corpora should run both spellings. Pre-20th-century legal documents are inconsistent in their orthography, and a search limited to one form will miss material.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries converge on the same short gloss — "to shut up" — and each anchors the procedural meaning with the same illustration from Bell's Dictionary of the Law of Scotland: inclosing a jury in Scotch practice. Black's (2nd ed.) adds two case citations that point toward judicial treatment of the term in American courts, offering a starting point for tracing how the procedural concept was received outside Scotland.
Anderson's is the outlier in a useful way. It is the only source dictionary that addresses the property-law dimension, linking "inclose" to "inclosure" and directing the reader to the entry for CLOSE. It also flags the etymological and conceptual connection to "include" — an observation the other dictionaries omit entirely. Anderson's entry is fragmentary as reproduced, but it points clearly toward the richer body of law surrounding common-field enclosure that the brief Black's gloss entirely ignores.
None of the historical dictionaries synthesizes the two tracks (property and procedure) or explains that the same word was doing substantially different legal work in different contexts. Researchers should not assume that finding a definition in one context settles meaning in the other.
Jurisdictional Note
The procedural usage ("to inclose a jury") is rooted in Scotch practice and appears in historical sources as a term of art specific to that system. American courts used analogous concepts of jury sequestration, but the term "inclose" in that procedural sense is not standard American usage. In property law, the significance of the act of inclosure varies considerably between English common-law jurisdictions, where enclosure of common land had a distinct legal history, and American jurisdictions, where common-field systems were less prevalent and the doctrine developed differently.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Inclosure; Close (Land); Jury Sequestration.