All 7 Uses of

encumber

in

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The palace place, encumbered with people, offered to the curious gazers at the windows the aspect of a sea; into which five or six streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged every moment fresh floods of heads.†
Chpt 1.1.1 *

encumbered = hindered

It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think that the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still encumbered with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement, the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir, the Marché aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfauçon, the barrier des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Sain†
Chpt 1.2.2

And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly encumbered with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus, with angels' heads and clouds, which seems a specimen pillaged from the Val-de-Grâce or the Invalides?†
Chpt 1.3.1

with people; the circular buildings of the wheat mart; the fragments of Philip Augustus's ancient wall, which could be made out here and there, drowned among the houses, its towers gnawed by ivy, its gates in ruins, with crumbling and deformed stretches of wall; the quay with its thousand shops, and its bloody knacker's yards; the Seine encumbered with boats, from the Port au Foin to Port-l'Evêque, and you will have a confused picture of what the central trapezium of the Town was like in 1482.†
Chpt 1.3.2

An immense crowd, which overflowed into all the neighboring streets, encumbered the Place, properly speaking.†
Chpt 2.8.6

Finally, a third audience, the most noisy, the most jovial, and the most numerous, encumbered benches and tables, in the midst of which harangued and swore a flute-like voice, which escaped from beneath a heavy armor, complete from casque to spurs.†
Chpt 2.10.3

They forced the line of assailants, and fled in every direction, leaving the Parvis encumbered with dead.†
Chpt 2.10.7

Definition:

hinder (make more difficult, or less valuable, hold back, or weigh down)