Definition
A Law French term meaning "ascending" or "mounting upward." Used in early common law pleading and procedure to describe an upward movement, progression, or increase — most commonly encountered in the context of rents, values, or amounts that rise or accumulate over time. The term appears in archaic legal texts as a modifier or descriptor and is rarely, if ever, used in modern legal practice or drafting.
Common Confusion
MOUNTAUNT and MOVANT (Movaunt) are easily confused when scanning Burrill or similar Law French vocabulary lists. They appear in proximity and share a superficial visual resemblance in manuscript hands. The meanings are entirely different: MOUNTAUNT means ascending or going upward; MOVANT means moving, and refers to the party who brings or urges a motion. In modern legal usage, MOVANT has survived and is in regular use; MOUNTAUNT has not.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering MOUNTAUNT in historical legal materials — particularly Year Books, early plea rolls, or treatises drawing on Law French sources — should read it as a directional or quantitative descriptor meaning "ascending" or "going up." It is not a term of art with a technical legal doctrine attached to it; it is a functional adjective borrowed from Law French that modifies whatever noun follows it in context.
The primary research trap is misreading the term as a proper noun, a place name, or a surname. In medieval and early modern legal manuscripts, capitalization and spelling are inconsistent, and MOUNTAUNT can easily be mistaken for a party's name or a geographic reference. Context is the corrective: when the term appears alongside numerical values, rental figures, or procedural sequences, it almost certainly carries its directional meaning of ascending or increasing.
A secondary trap involves conflation with the adjacent entry in Burrill: MOVANT (or Movaunt), meaning "moving." Because Burrill places these entries in close proximity, researchers scanning the dictionary may run the entries together. MOUNTAUNT and MOVANT are distinct terms with distinct meanings — the former concerns direction or quantity (ascending), the latter concerns agency in motion (the party who moves the court). See COMMON CONFUSION below.
The term surfaces in sources citing Britton, the 13th-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise, which is one of the few surviving texts where Law French technical vocabulary of this kind is preserved in systematic use. Researchers working with Britton or commentaries upon it should be alert to MOUNTAUNT appearing in rent or value contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary historical source for this term in the Anglo-American legal lexicon. Burrill defines MOUNTAUNT simply as "L. Fr. Ascending," citing Britton at folios 271b and 274. The entry is characteristically spare — Burrill does not attempt to expand the definition or supply illustrative case law, reflecting the term's status as a descriptive functional word rather than a contested doctrinal concept.
No competing or contradictory definition exists across the available shelf sources, largely because the term is narrow enough in meaning that disagreement is improbable. The historical dictionaries that do not include MOUNTAUNT (a majority) simply omit it as too archaic or too incidental to merit a standalone entry. Its presence in Burrill is itself evidence of the breadth of Burrill's treatment of Law French vocabulary compared to later dictionaries.
What the historical sources do not supply is any case history or treatise discussion explaining how MOUNTAUNT operated in specific pleading contexts. Researchers seeking that contextual detail will need to go to Britton directly or to annotated editions and translations of that text.