Definition
An archaic English legal verb meaning to usurp authority or jurisdiction — to draw power or rights to oneself improperly, as if hooking them away from their proper holder. The term appears in early English statutes and legal writing to describe the act of an official or court assuming jurisdiction or prerogatives beyond those lawfully granted. It is the direct ancestor of the modern term ENCROACH and is functionally synonymous with it in legal contexts.
Common Language
No current common English entry exists for "incroch" as a living word — it has passed entirely out of ordinary use. Its descendant, "encroach," remains active in both common and legal speech, defined in modern usage (Wiktionary) as to gradually intrude on or trespass upon the territory, rights, or domain of another, and in historical usage (Webster's 1913) as to enter gradually or stealthily upon the rights or possessions of another. The legal meaning of "incroch" in its historical context is narrower than the broad territorial sense now carried by "encroach": it referred specifically to the usurpation of legal jurisdiction or official authority, not mere physical or spatial intrusion.
Common Confusion
INCROCH and ENCROACH share a root and are often treated as identical, but researchers should not assume free substitution when reading historical sources. "Incroch" appears in a specific jurisdictional context — official usurpation of legal power — while "encroach" in later usage expanded to cover property boundaries, easements, and general overreach. When Burrill glosses "incroch" as "see Encroach," he signals continuity of concept, not perfect equivalence of scope.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter "incroch" almost exclusively in pre-modern English statutory and legal writing, particularly in the context of admiralty and prerogative disputes. The term's primary documented appearance is in the Statute 15 Richard II, c. 3, which addressed the overreach of admirals and their deputies into jurisdictions properly belonging to common law courts — a live controversy in late medieval English law. Understanding "incroch" as a jurisdictional-usurpation term (rather than a property-boundary term) is essential to reading that statute and similar materials correctly.
The term is effectively a fossil in the Law Mind corpus: you will not find it in modern legal writing, but you may encounter it in treatises, abridgements, and statutes copied or glossed from medieval sources, as well as in Blount's Glossographia, which Burrill cites. If your research involves admiralty jurisdiction, the expansion of royal prerogative courts, or the common law–admiralty boundary disputes of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, "incroch" is a keyword worth recognizing.
One practical trap: OCR and transcription errors in digitized historical sources can render "incroch" as "ineroach," "incroach," or "in croch." Search for all variants when surveying pre-1700 materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source covering this term, and his entry is brief but reliable. He traces the Latin law form "incrochiare" to the Law French "encrocher" and offers a Latin gloss — "velut hama subducere," meaning roughly "to draw under as with a hook" — that captures the original sense vividly. He quotes the Statute 15 Richard II directly and cites Blount, indicating the term was preserved in Blount's Glossographia (1670), one of the standard glossaries of obsolete English legal terms. No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus (Black's, Bouvier's, Jacob's) give "incroch" a standalone entry, all treating it as absorbed into "encroach." This is consistent with the term's obsolescence by the time those dictionaries were compiled. The absence of the term in later dictionaries should not mislead a researcher into thinking the concept it named disappeared — jurisdictional usurpation remained a significant legal concern, but the word for it changed.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Admiralty Jurisdiction (historical); Encroachment.