Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "remainder" or "that which remains." Used in early English legal instruments to denote what is left over, what follows after, or what is yet to come — particularly in reference to a continuing period of time or a surviving interest in property. The phrase "a remenaunt" carried the sense of "forever after" or "for all remaining time," functioning as a perpetuity marker in older conveyancing language.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in current use as a standard English word.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry this term as an independent entry, though the underlying concept maps closely to "remnant" — defined as that which is left after the removal or separation of a part; a residue.
The gap between the common concept and the legal use is one of precision and function. In ordinary speech, "remnant" suggests a leftover fragment, often incidental. In law, remenaunt operated as a term of art in conveyancing to signal a formally recognized continuing or residual interest, particularly in temporal constructions — not a mere leftover, but a legally operative future or remaining portion.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will almost exclusively find it in pre-modern English legal instruments, Year Books, or treatises dealing with the history of property conveyance. Several navigational points deserve attention:
First, the term belongs to the Law French stratum of English legal vocabulary — language used by English courts and legal drafters from roughly the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. Readers working in this corpus must approach it as a term of art, not as misspelled Middle English or French.
Second, the phrase "a remenaunt; for ever after" (as recorded by Kelham and cited through Burrill) suggests the term was used to introduce perpetual or indefinite future duration in a grant or conveyance. This is directly relevant to researching the history of fee simple language, restraints on alienation, and the evolution of remainder doctrine.
Third, there is no modern legal counterpart using this precise word. Any modern legal meaning is carried instead by "remainder" (in property law) or by temporal phrases like "thereafter" or "from and after." A researcher who encounters remenaunt in a document should treat it as an archaic signal that a remainder-type interest or a continuing temporal grant follows.
Fourth, the term may appear in variant spellings in manuscript sources. Law French spelling was not standardized, and forms such as "remanant," "remenaunte," or similar constructions may represent the same word.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary dictionary source for this term in the Law Mind corpus, and its entry is brief: the term is glossed as Law French, meaning "remaining; to come after; remainder," with the illustrative phrase "a remenaunt; for ever after" attributed to Kelham's Norman-French Dictionary.
Burrill's entry is characteristically terse for archaic Law French terms, but it preserves the key functional meaning: the word carried both a spatial/property sense (that which remains in an estate) and a temporal sense (all time thereafter). This dual function is worth noting for researchers, because it places remenaunt at the intersection of two important legal concepts — the law of remainders in real property and the construction of perpetual grants.
Historical sources outside the Law Mind corpus — including Termes de la Ley and similar Law French glossaries — confirm that remanet and cognate forms were common in pleading and conveyancing records to denote what persists or carries forward after a preceding disposition. Burrill's citation to Kelham is traceable and reliable.
What historical dictionaries collectively miss is any detailed treatment of how this term functioned in specific pleading contexts, or how it was eventually displaced by Anglicized equivalents. Researchers needing that level of detail should look to histories of conveyancing and the evolution of remainder doctrine in property law treatises.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the English legal tradition and its early American inheritance. It has no equivalent use in civil law systems and would not appear in Scottish, French, or other continental legal sources in the same functional sense.