Definition
In feudal law, to pay relief to the lord of a manor upon becoming his vassal. The act of accapitare was the formal acknowledgment of the feudal bond expressed through payment: a new tenant, upon succeeding to a holding, made a payment to the chief lord as a token of submission and dependency. The fuller Latin phrase — *capitali domino accapitare* — specifies payment made to the chief lord (the lord paramount) specifically, distinguishing the obligation owed to the head of the feudal chain from any intermediate obligations owed to mesne lords.
Relief itself was the sum paid by an heir for the privilege of taking up a deceased ancestor's fief. Accapitare captures both the act of payment and its character as an expression of obedience and homage, not merely a financial transaction.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal records, land surveys, and early feudal tenure instruments. Researchers encountering it will most often find it in translated or transcribed English manorial records, Domesday-adjacent documents, or scholarly commentary on feudal land law. It is not a term of living practice and does not appear in modern legal instruments.
The principal research trap is treating accapitare as equivalent to relief alone. The word carries the additional connotation of homage and submission — the political-personal dimension of the feudal relationship — which relief in its later purely monetary sense had largely shed by the early modern period. A document using accapitare may be signaling something more than a financial obligation; it may be evidence of the full ceremony of vassalage acknowledgment.
Researchers working backward from English inheritance and land law should note that relief obligations survived in attenuated form long after the personal-submission aspect of accapitare had become a legal fiction. The Tenures Abolition Act 1660 eliminated most of the feudal incidents with which accapitare was associated, making the term effectively archaic in English law from that point forward.
For American legal sources, accapitare has no operative legal meaning whatsoever and appears only in historical or comparative discussions of feudal land tenure imported into early colonial analysis.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only source among the Law Mind shelf dictionaries to carry this term, which is itself instructive: the word was already sufficiently archaic by the late nineteenth century that most American legal dictionaries did not find it worth treating. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is terse but precise, correctly identifying the two-part character of the obligation — payment and obedience — and noting the significance of the phrase *capitali domino*, the chief lord. The entry does not elaborate on how relief was calculated or how accapitare related to the broader ceremony of homage and fealty, gaps that researchers would need to fill from specialized feudal law sources such as Pollock & Maitland's *History of English Law* or Blackstone's treatment of feudal tenures in Book II of the *Commentaries*.
No meaningful divergence exists among sources, for the simple reason that only one source treats the term. The historian or legal researcher requiring depth beyond Rapalje & Lawrence must turn to feudal law scholarship rather than general legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
No modern jurisdiction employs this term as operative law. Its relevance is confined to historical research into English and Continental feudal land tenure. Scottish feudal law, which survived in modified form significantly longer than English feudal incidents, may present more frequent encounters with the underlying concept, though typically under different terminology.