Definition
To occupy or cultivate land; to work or manure the soil. The term appears in Law French contexts and describes the physical act of occupying and tending to land, typically by a tenant or cultivator. It is closely associated with the concept of manurance — the active use and improvement of land through labor.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear exclusively in Law French materials and early English legal sources, particularly those drawing on Britton, the late-thirteenth-century legal treatise from which Burrill's citation derives. Researchers encountering *meynoverer* in manuscript or early printed sources should recognize it as a verb form and not confuse it with a proper noun or term of art describing a legal status. Its significance is practical rather than doctrinal: it describes conduct — the physical occupation and cultivation of land — rather than a right or title. In feudal tenure contexts, this conduct had legal consequences, since active manurance could bear on questions of seisin, possession, and the obligations running between lord and tenant. Researchers working on villeinage, copyhold tenure, or early common law possession will encounter this term as part of a vocabulary cluster around land use and occupation. The term has no meaningful survival into modern legal usage and will not appear outside historical sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source carrying this term, and its entry is spare: it defines *meynoverer* as Law French for "to occupy; to manure," cross-referencing the entry for *manure* (used in its older legal sense of cultivating or working land, not the modern agrarian sense) and citing Britton, chapter 40, folio 104. Burrill's cross-reference to *manure* is the more useful entry for researchers, as that term receives fuller treatment and connects more directly to the doctrinal literature on seisin and tenure. No other historical law dictionary in the standard shelf — not Bouvier, not Jacob, not Black's in its early editions — carries this term, which reflects both its narrow Law French register and its limited doctrinal weight. Researchers should treat Britton as the primary source and Burrill as a secondary guide to the vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs entirely to the English common law tradition and its Law French legal vocabulary. It has no counterpart in American legal usage and will not appear in any American source.