Definition
A Latin term from medieval English feudal law meaning to pay a relief to the lord of a manor upon becoming a vassal. More specifically, *capitali domino accipitare* denotes the act of paying relief, rendering homage, or acknowledging obedience to the chief lord at the commencement of a feudal tenure relationship. The term describes both the payment itself and the formal act of submission by which a new tenant acknowledged the lord's superior title and secured recognition of the tenancy.
Common Confusion
ACCIPITARE should not be confused with the general concept of homage, though the two were closely related in practice. Homage was the ceremonial oath of fealty and personal submission; accipitare denotes specifically the payment or tender of relief — the financial or material consideration owed to the lord upon entry into the tenancy, particularly upon inheritance or a change of tenant. The two acts often occurred together but were legally distinct obligations.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal sources and is unlikely to surface in any post-medieval primary material. Researchers will encounter it primarily in treatises dealing with feudal tenure and in records relating to manorial administration. Its practical significance to Law Mind corpus research is largely confined to:
1. Reading Fleta and similar medieval Latin legal compilations, where the term appears in discussions of feudal obligations and the incidents of tenure.
2. Understanding the technical vocabulary surrounding relief — one of the key incidents of feudal landholding — as it appears in early English land records, plea rolls, and manorial surveys.
3. Tracing the conceptual lineage of relief and homage as they evolved into later common law doctrines of seisin, entry fines, and, eventually, the land transfer mechanisms that displaced them.
Researchers should be alert to the fact that the term carries no currency in modern legal writing. Its appearance in a source is itself a dating and contextual signal: the text is either medieval or is consciously quoting or analyzing medieval law. Do not expect consistency in spelling across manuscript sources — Latin legal terms in this period appear in variant orthographies depending on the scribe and the tradition of the specific document.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary preserves the term with a brief but precise definition, referencing Fleta, lib. 2, c. 50, as its source. Fleta is a late thirteenth-century Latin treatise on English common law, composed around 1290, and the citation is reliable as a primary source anchor.
Black's correctly identifies the dual character of the act — payment of relief on one hand, and the broader acknowledgment of vassalage (homage or obedience) on the other. The phrase *capitali domino accipitare* is rendered accurately as paying relief or rendering obedience to the chief lord.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply, because it falls outside their scope, is the broader feudal context that makes the term meaningful: relief was one of the profitable incidents of tenure by which lords extracted value from the tenure relationship at moments of transition — inheritance, alienation, or the establishment of a new tenancy. Accipitare is thus a term of transactional feudal law, not merely of ceremony. The researcher who encounters it in a primary source should be asking: what tenure is being described, who is the chief lord, and what was the occasion that triggered the obligation?
No significant divergence appears across available dictionary sources; the term is too narrow and archaic to have generated competing definitions.
Jurisdictional Note
Accipitare is a term of English feudal law and appears in sources rooted in the English common law tradition. It has no relevance to civilian or canon law jurisdictions. Within the English tradition, the feudal system of relief was formally abolished by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660, after which the term became purely historical.