Definition
A term from Law French, meaning "to keep" or "to hold." Appearing in medieval legal records and pleading, *tenser* functioned as a verb root signifying the act of holding or maintaining — particularly in the context of obligations to keep the peace, maintain property, or retain a person in custody. The entry in Burrill derives from Kelham's glossary of Law French terms and reflects the archaic register of Anglo-Norman legal language that pervaded English common law pleading through the seventeenth century.
The term has no surviving doctrinal life in modern law. It is encountered almost exclusively in the transcription and interpretation of old records, plea rolls, and writs.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The comparative form of the adjective *tense* — meaning "more tense."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not applicable; the Law French *tenser* is unrelated to the English adjective *tense* and does not appear as a common English word in Webster's 1913.
The superficial resemblance between the Law French *tenser* and the modern English comparative *tenser* is purely coincidental. A researcher encountering the word in an old record should not read it as a descriptive adjective. In its legal context, it is a verb of obligation or custody, not a modifier.
---
Common Confusion
Do not confuse *tenser* with *tenure*, *tenant*, or *tenir*, though all share a Latin root (*tenere*, to hold) and a conceptual family resemblance. *Tenure* and *tenant* evolved into terms of art with continuous doctrinal lives; *tenser* did not. The shared root can mislead a researcher into treating *tenser* as a variant spelling of one of these surviving terms — it is not.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter *tenser* — if at all — in transcriptions of medieval or early modern English legal records: plea rolls, close rolls, year books, and related primary sources. The primary risk is misreading: the word looks like ordinary English but carries a technical Law French meaning. A second risk is incomplete transcription; Burrill's entry itself is truncated ("An per-"), suggesting the full definition may have been cut off at page or column break in the source edition. Researchers relying on that entry alone should treat it as a partial gloss and cross-check against Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779), which Burrill cites as authority.
The term belongs to a cluster of Law French verbal forms — alongside *tenir* (to hold), *garder* (to keep), and *saisir* (to seize) — that underpin much of early English property and custody law. Understanding *tenser* aids comprehension of the conceptual vocabulary of seisin, ward, and mainprise. Researchers tracing the history of "keeping the peace" obligations may find *tenser* appearing in contexts that are conceptual ancestors of recognizance and surety instruments.
Because the word is rare and the corpus of primary sources using it is specialized, it will not appear in modern legal indexes. Searches in historical record repositories or digitized year books are the appropriate route.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the only shelf source in the Law Mind corpus to record this term, and his entry is plainly truncated — ending mid-phrase ("An per-") — which limits its utility as a standalone authority. Burrill routes the reader to Kelham, making Kelham the effective primary source. Neither Black's Law Dictionary (in its early editions) nor Bouvier's Law Dictionary includes *tenser* as a headword, which reflects how narrowly the term circulated even among nineteenth-century legal lexicographers.
No significant divergence exists among sources because there are effectively no competing sources. The term is a lexical fossil, preserved in Burrill almost as an artifact of his commitment to comprehensiveness in Law French vocabulary rather than because the term had active doctrinal currency at the time of writing.
---