Definition
A Latin term of medieval legal pleading meaning accomplishment or fulfillment. Used in old common law pleading to denote the completion or performance of an act, obligation, or condition. The term appears in formal pleading records as a technical descriptor for the carrying out of something previously agreed upon or required.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the specialized vocabulary of early English common law pleading and will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern sources — entries books, plea rolls, and procedural texts from the period when Latin remained the operative language of English courts. Researchers encountering this term in manuscript sources or early printed pleading records should not confuse its narrow procedural sense (formal completion of a pleaded act) with the broader modern concept of accomplishment as achievement.
The two citations Burrill supplies — Coke's Entries and Townshend's Pleas — are the primary locations where this term surfaces in the printed tradition. Researchers working in those texts will find accompliamentum used as a formulaic pleading word rather than as substantive legal doctrine. It is a word of form, not of substance. That distinction matters: its presence in a plea signals procedural completion, not a legal standard to be analyzed.
Because the term is confined to Latin pleading practice that was effectively abandoned after the shift to English pleading formalized in the nineteenth century, it carries no meaningful modern doctrinal weight. Researchers should treat it as a terminus technicus of the pleading forms era, useful for reading and translating historical documents but irrelevant to contemporary legal analysis.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the Law Mind shelf sources. The entry is spare: a language tag (L. Lat.), a context tag (old pleading), a one-word gloss (accomplishment), and two citations. Burrill offers no elaboration on usage or context, which reflects the term's purely formal character — there is simply no doctrine attached to it to explain.
The two source citations Burrill provides are Coke's Entries (Co. Entr. 227) and Townshend's Pleadings (Towns. Pl. 49), both standard reference works for common law pleading forms. Neither source develops the term as a concept; both use it as part of set pleading language. No other historical legal dictionary in the standard reference tradition — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Black's early editions — appears to carry an independent entry for this term, which underscores its status as a narrow technical form-word rather than a general legal concept.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to the English common law pleading tradition and has no recognized equivalent use in American, Scottish, or civilian legal systems. American courts transitioned away from Latin pleading forms early in the republic's history; researchers working in American sources after the early nineteenth century are unlikely to encounter it.