Definition
An archaic term from old English law meaning entangled or ensnared. The word appears in historical legal texts to describe a person caught, trapped, or enmeshed — whether in a legal proceeding, a snare, or a compromising circumstance from which escape was difficult or impossible. The term has no active modern legal usage and survives only in historical and antiquarian legal sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recorded as a current English word. The term is effectively obsolete in ordinary speech.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as a distinct entry. The root concept connects to "enlace" — to entwine, entangle, or bind with laces or cords — which persisted in literary English longer than the legal form.
The gap here is directionality: where the common root ("enlace") evokes physical intertwining or ornamental binding, the legal usage carried a distinctly negative, coercive sense — being caught or trapped, typically in circumstances adverse to one's legal position or liberty. The legal term describes a condition imposed on a person, not a neutral physical state.
Common Confusion
INLEASED is occasionally confused with terms related to leasing or letting property (given the visual similarity to "in-leased" or "in lease"). The two are entirely unrelated. INLEASED derives from the French *enlassé* and carries no connection to lease agreements, tenancy, or contract law. Researchers encountering the term in a historical document should resist the instinct to read it as a property or contract term.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in materials predating the eighteenth century and will be encountered mainly by researchers working in early English legal history, Year Books, or texts drawing on Coke's Institutes. Its practical research value is limited to confirming the meaning of a word found in a primary source — it is not a term of art with an ongoing doctrinal life.
The primary trap is misreading. A researcher scanning old English legal documents may encounter *inleased* or variant spellings (*enlaced*, *enlast*, *inlaced*) and misidentify the term as relating to leases or contracts. Spelling was not standardized in the period when this word was in use, and scribal or typesetting variation is common.
The citation trail is narrow. All three historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus point to the same single source: Coke's *Second Institutes* (2 Inst. 247), supplemented by Cowell's *Interpreter* and Blount's *Nomo-Lexicon*. This convergence suggests the term had already become antiquarian by the time the dictionaries were compiled — none of the editors appear to have encountered it in live legal usage.
Researchers should note that this is a descriptive term, not a term of art creating legal rights or obligations. Finding it in a historical document signals something about the condition or status of a person described, not a legal category with defined consequences.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three sources in the Law Mind corpus agree on the definition — entangled or ensnared — and all three cite the same authority: 2 Inst. 247 (Coke's *Second Institutes*). Burrill adds the French root (*enlasse*), which is the most etymologically informative contribution among the three entries and helps confirm the term's Norman-French lineage into Middle English legal vocabulary.
Black's first and second editions reproduce the definition with minor typographic variation ("Entangled" versus "Entungled" — the latter almost certainly a typesetting error in the second edition rather than a meaningful variant). Neither Black's edition adds substantive content beyond what Burrill provides.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: they offer no context for how the term functioned within Coke's text, what legal consequence followed from a person being *inleased*, or whether the term had procedural significance. Researchers needing that context must go directly to 2 Inst. 247.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses this term. Researchers may find relevant background in entries on early English legal procedure, Norman-French legal vocabulary, or the reception of French terms into the common law.